The May updates for Oracle's Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service (FCCS) have arrived. After the lack of an update for April, Oracle has provided an assortment of updates, including improvements to Task Manager, the creation of on-demand rules, and support for additional Essbase functions in configurable calculations.
The monthly update for FCCS will occur on Friday, May 17 during your normal daily maintenance window.
FCCS now provides an approval process and workflow. Administrators can manage the approvals process by creating an approval unit hierarchy or modifying the default approval unit hierarchy, setting up the promotional path, and reviewing status. Users can start, promote, reject, approve, and submit data through the promotional path set up for the approval unit hierarchy.
On-Demand Rules enable you to add your own ad hoc rules that can be used for calculations outside of the consolidation process. The calculation results can be verified or adjusted prior to invoking consolidation. OnDemand rules are created by administrators, and can be launched from data forms, Smart View, journals, Supplemental Data, or from the Rules card by users with launch permissions.
The Metadata Validation process has been enhanced with new validations. For example, the system now checks to ensure that primary members exist before shared members, whether a Custom or Multi-GAAP parent member is shared, or whether Level 0 members have the Dynamic Calc property.
It is strongly recommended that you apply the validation error recommendations to minimize risks of data integrity issues and take advantage of best practice performance considerations.
Administrators can now view the history of all Task Manager changes from the Audit card. For example, the Audit log now includes all changes in running schedules and details about deleted tasks, templates and other Task Manager objects or settings.
In Task Manager System Settings, Administrators can select the workflow users who can approve task reassignment requests. In addition to Administrators and Power Users, Users can now approve reassignment requests from their Worklist if the Administrator has granted them permissions.
When Administrators set up email notifications for Task Manager, they can also set the number of days before the due dates to send reminders.
New End User Task Types have been added for Task Manager Integrations.
For FCCS:
Administrators and Power Users can perform a bulk update of teams and members, rather than having to update teams and members individually. In addition, from the Manage User page, you can export a list of users to a CSV file to obtain user information.
You can now use these additional Essbase Financial functions in Calculation Manager when you create configurable calculations: @ATTRIBUTE, @COMPOUND, @INTEREST, @IRR, @NPV, @SHIFT, @SHIFTMINUS, and @SHIFTPLUS.
When you use Dynamic user variables in the form, you can select these additional options for the validation rule:
As announced in previous readiness documents, starting with this update (Release 19.05), Oracle has removed the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms). This change will be reflected in test environments starting May 03, 2019 and in production environments starting May 17, 2019. You can still edit and use existing composite forms. You can also migrate composite forms from other applications and supported on-premises versions of Planning applications and use them. However, you cannot create new composite forms in the service.
Oracle recommends all customers to shift their usage to dashboards instead of composite forms.
When you run Copy Data or Clear Data, corresponding audit entries are now available in the Data task group of the Audit Task List.
The new Workflow mode provides a scalable solution when processing large volumes of data. By default the data load process in Data Management is designed with a well-defined process flow that provides a full audit of the data load process as well as the ability to drill down and view data in Workbench. However, a full data flow may contribute to lengthy processing times due to archiving of data for audit purposes. There are many data load use cases that the audit is not required and performance is a key requirement.
The full data flow is the default mode for loading data. Data is loaded in the standard way between the staging tables, data can be viewed in Workbench, and drill down is supported.
A full (no archive) data flow loads data in the same manner as the full mode, but data is deleted from the staging tables at the end of the data load process. Data can be viewed in the Workbench only after the import step. No drill down is available with the full (no archive) mode. This method is useful when you want to review and validate the data during load process but auditing or drill down is not a requirement. This method does not provide performance improvement but limits space usage since data is not persisted for future reference.
The simple workflow mode limits data movement between the staging tables. No drill down is available and the data cannot be viewed in the Workbench. This method provides performance improvement and is useful when you do not require auditing or drill down.
Starting in this release, the total number of index files and page files will be shown in the run time statistics for Block Storage (BSO) cubes.
The previous BSO statistics (hit ratio on index cache, hit ratio on data cache, hit ratio on data file cache, number of index page reads, number of index page writes, number of data block reads, and number of data block writes) are no longer displayed.
Since Essbase run time statistics are no longer available in Cloud applications, there is no reason to show 0 value entries. These statistics were turned off to improve performance.
A new server setting, Chart Plotting Ignores Data Values allows you to define whether #MISSING, #ERROR and #ZERO values are plotted on charts.
A new version of the Planning Admin Extension for Smart View is now provided with each monthly update of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud, Oracle Financial Close and Consolidation Cloud, and Oracle Tax Reporting Cloud.
The Planning Admin Extension version will always be in sync with the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud version. Each month, the extension may or may not include customer- and internally-reported fixed defects. However, for consistency and interoperability with the EPM Cloud platform, and ease in troubleshooting issues, Oracle recommends that administrators download and install the latest Planning Admin Extension each month.
A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes support for Mac OS and the ability to run multiple sessions of the utility from the same directory. This version also includes new commands ( ApplicationAdminMode and SortMember) and updates to the replay command to support Lagtime parameter and to the ProvisionReport command, which now, by default, generates the simplified version of the Provisioning report instead of the classic version. You must install this version of the utility to use these enhancements.
With the new application configuration option, Ad Hoc Behavior, Service Administrators can enable the following enhanced ad hoc features and behaviors in Smart View: in grid, cell-based POV, submit without refresh, additional free-form functionality, and multiple grid ad hoc.
To enable the Ad Hoc Behavior option, select the Navigator. In the Application group, select Settings, and then set the Ad Hoc Behavior option to Standard (the default is Native). These ad hoc features are then available to Smart View users:
Oracle Smart View for Office 11.1.2.5.900 will be available in May 2019. This version includes new features and fixed defects.
New features include:
This release also fixes a number of defects.
The Smart View 11.1.2.5.900 Readme, available on the Help Center, will contain a complete list of features and defects addressed in this version. You must install this version to ensure access to the new functionalities.
As announced in previous readiness documents, starting with this update (Release 19.05) to EPM Services, Oracle will support only Transport Layer Security protocol version 1.2 (TLS 1.2) to communicate with EPM Cloud. To ensure the highest level of authentication and data encryption security, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will no longer be supported after your environments are updated on May 3, 2019.
Note: Support for TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 will be removed for both your Test and Production environments on May 3, 2019.
Because most modern operating systems and browsers support TLS 1.2; users of such systems and browsers will not be affected by the deprecation of TLS 1.0 and 1.1. EPM Automate and Smart View are also not affected by this change.
After TLS 1.1 is deprecated, you cannot use client operating systems that do not support TLS 1.2 (for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Microsoft Windows 2002) to run operating system-specific commands (for example, code to run cURL tools to transfer data and custom code that integrates with the Rest APIs) against EPM Cloud. Additionally, Smart View installed on such systems will also fail to communicate with EPM Cloud. Similarly, you cannot use browsers that do not support TLS 1.2 protocol to access EPM Cloud environments.
In a future update, there will be a revised interface with enhanced navigation and a new theme called Sky Blue.
The following services will adopt this new theme as their default interface:
The revised interface retains existing functionality and enhances your Home page experience with a more responsive design. The Welcome panel and the global header readjust after resizing, which means less scrolling. Clearer announcements and notification areas are added to the Welcome panel, as are arrows to help you navigate easily between the Home page and your infolets. A bigger Navigator menu has improved usability, more themes for customization are included, and a bigger work area has more space to maneuver and provide better visibility. The interface is more consistent with other Oracle products, such as Fusion Applications.
After the interface is released, all new customers will use the new lighter-colored Sky Blue theme, and existing customers will keep their current theme. You can switch themes using Tools, and then Appearance.
Starting in the 19.05 update, if you are already using extended dimensions and have environments running one of the patches listed below, they will be upgraded to the 19.05 monthly patch automatically during the respective scheduled maintenance window on these environments:
On May 3rd, Test environments (service name ends with –test) will be upgraded during the scheduled maintenance window that starts any time after the 22:00 UTC. On May 17th, Production environments will be upgraded during the scheduled maintenance window that starts any time after the 22:00 UTC.
If your environments are on the latest extended dimensions patch 19.03.90 before these dates, then no additional downtime is required. If your environments are on older extended dimensions patches, we will upgrade them one patch version at a time until they are upgraded to 19.05. This incremental upgrade process may cause the scheduled maintenance window on the respective environments to take up to 3 hours.
To reduce the duration of this extended maintenance, we suggest you open a Support Request (SR) to update your environment to 19.03.90 or as close to 19.03.90 as possible such as 19.02.90 or 19.01.90, prior to this upgrade to 19.05.
If you need different timing for the upgrade process to 19.05, open a Support Request (SR) no later than 1 week prior to the upgrade timing you prefer.
After the 19.05 update has been applied to your extended dimensionality environment, you will no longer need to raise SRs requesting the monthly updates for these environments.
With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update in 2019. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.
Additional Updates to Connections Interface
Starting with the June update, you will see a number of additional changes to the Connections interface.
When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.
When copying an entity with a Calculation Status of No Data, the target should also have a Calculation Status of No Data. The Copy Data process is incorrectly setting the Calculation Status to Impacted.
In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.
When using Smart View, after adding a Shared Member, Refresh and Submit may not work correctly.
It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.
In Supplemental Data forms, the horizontal scroll does not work on a non-tabular form, which is intended only for use on a single record. Do not use non-tabular layout if the form is meant for more than one record.
A Cube refresh will not complete if a level 0 currency dimension member has the "Label only" data storage property, but this is not currently detected in the Dimension Editor or Metadata Validator.
If you are using an Extended Dimensionality environment, on seeded forms, use the View members, such as Periodic, QTD and YTD, instead of using functions to ensure the _RULE members are not accidentally added to the forms.
If you are using an Extended Dimensionality environment, users other than the Administrator can view the FCCS_VIEW_SYSTEM_MEMBERS and its hierarchy in the data form and Intercompany reports.
When you create a Translation Override rule, redirection does not work properly when you use a shared Parent account for the Source. The workaround is to specify the primary Parent account.
Some of the Simplified Dimension Editor errors (cells outlined in red) are false-positive errors (that is, incorrectly reported as errors). Data Storage errors for the following members should be ignored:
If you are using an Extended Dimensionality upgraded environment, the Simplified Dimension Editor does not show Dynamic Calc as an allowed value for Custom dimension parent member Data Storage. This issue does not occur in a newly-installed Extended Dimensionality environment. You can use the Classic Dimension Editor, Import Metadata, or Smart View to change the Data Storage value.
In addition, the Metadata Validator incorrectly shows validation errors for the following:
When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.
In Supplemental Data, when setting the Data Collection Period (DCP), the Start, End, and Close dates must be inside the valid range.
Sometimes when importing an account, error messages may be generated because there are several accounts that reference an intercompany account in the Plug Account column but that account has yet to be encountered in the account file.
Try to reimport the account.
You should not make metadata changes that result in the following:
Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts. If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature. When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension. If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.
In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue: Use the keyboard arrow keys to make your selection, then close and reopen the dialog; or Minimize and then reopen the dialog; or Use a different browser.
For an Extended Dimensionality application with Ratios enabled, consolidation performance may be slower. When you create an Extended Dimensionality application, you should not enable the “Include Ratio Calculations” feature.