The August updates for Oracle's Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) and Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (EPBCS) have arrived! This blog post outlines several new features, including an incremental export and import behavior change, updated vision sample application, and more.
The monthly update for PBCS and EPBCS will occur on Friday, August 17 during your normal daily maintenance window.
In the initial 18.07 update, Oracle changed the behavior of incremental export and import operations to prevent the selection of Essbase Data and a few other artifacts. Due to customer demand, Oracle reverted this change in a later 18.07 patch, which was applied to your test and production environments. The reverted behavior allows you to select all artifacts, including Essbase Data artifacts, during incremental exports and imports.
Due to this change, these artifacts can now be selected for incremental exports. These can also be imported from snapshots:
For simplified multicurrency applications, a new option in Application Settings enables currency calculations in forms and batch currency rule based on the scenario definition. To select this new option, from the Navigator , click System Settings and Defaults, and then Current Application Defaults. On the Application Settings tab, select Yes for Enable currency calculation based on scenario time period.
A new properties panel on the right side of the Infolets Designer enables you to view and work with various properties of infolets, such as the title, subtitle, chart type, size, and so on. The properties panel displays the properties of the infolet (and its displayed view) which is highlighted by the blue border.
To view the properties panel in the Infolets Designer, from the Home page, click Infolets, and then either create an infolet or edit an existing infolet.
The listing pages for dashboards and infolets now support folders. Folders enable you to assign permissions to all artifacts within a folder rather than assigning permissions to each individual artifact. The listing pages for dashboards and infolets will look and behave the same as the listing page for data (forms). All three artifact listing pages (forms, dashboards, and infolets) use the same folder hierarchy and all artifacts and folders reside under a root folder called Library...
Search and Filter will also work for dashboards and infolets in the same way as they do for forms.
Run Batch With Signed On User Credentials, a new server setting, is available in Financial Reporting Web Studio. When this setting is set to true, there is no prompt for a username and password in the Batch Scheduler; instead, the batch is run with the credentials of the user who is currently signed in.
To set this property, open Financial Reporting Web Studio and select File, and then Mange, and then Server.
NOTE: You must restart the environment to enable the new setting. You can restart an environment using the resetservice EPM Automate command or by modifying the maintenance start time. If you do not restart the environment, the setting will take effect after the next scheduled daily maintenance of the environment.
Starting with this monthly update, Oracle will stop distributing the Financial Reporting Desktop Studio installer. The command line utilities associated with Financial Reporting Desktop Studio will also be discontinued starting with the 18.08 update.
NOTE: Existing installations of the Financial Reporting Desktop Studio and command line utilities will no longer work with Financial Reporting starting with the 18.09 update.
Use Financial Reporting Web Studio instead of Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client.
An updated version of the Vision sample application is available starting with this update. The Vision sample application helps you learn how to use Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud to plan, forecast and track the financial performance of your business.
The updated sample application contains these features that were added to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud (PBCS) in recent updates:
INFOLETS
The Vision application now supports Infolets, which provide the dashboard capability to enable data visualization. As a Service Administrator, you can create infolets for any cube to provide enhanced graphical data presentation to users using charts and texts.
ABILITY TO ENTER DATA INTO SUPPRESSED ROWS
The updated sample application allows Service Administrators enable users to enter data in a web form for members on rows that are currently suppressed (because they have no data and the form layout option “Suppress Missing Data – Rows” option is selected).
NAVIGATION FLOWS
Service Administrators can set up connections that enable users to navigate across Oracle EPM Cloud environments to create unified business process flows across multiple environments. Cross-environment navigation flows allow users of multiple EPM Cloud environments to sign into one environment, and then seamlessly navigate to others without going through additional authentication processes.
Service Administrators can create mash-ups of artifacts from various environments into a single unified business process flow for their users. Clusters, cards, and tabs can be brought together into a single flow. These cards and tabs can contain forms, reports dashboards from various applications. Users will not see the clusters, cards and tabs in the process flow unless they are members of the groups to which these flows are assigned.
SMART FORMS
Three Smart forms one containing Excel formulas, one containing Excel functions, and one containing smart form created in Smart View are included.
REORGANIZED CLUSTERS AND CARDS THAT MATCH THE NEWEST EPM CLOUD INTERFACE
Clusters and cards in the sample application now match the current EPM Cloud interface.
Information on leveraging available Enterprise Management Cloud tools to diagnose and address performance issues with business rules is now available in the new "Optimizing Business Rules" section of Designing with Calculation Manager for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.
To allow customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle will defer the removing support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update. The current plan is to remove access to the Classic Dimension Editor starting with the 18.10 (October 2018) update to the service.
To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle will defer removing the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future release update (January 2019 - 19.01). Oracle had previously announced that this feature will be removed in the June (18.06) update.
All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. There will be no more enhancements to the composite forms functionality.
All existing customers will be migrated to the new Financial Reporting Repository (implemented in the 18.05 update for new customers). The process does not migrate Financial Reporting user preferences.
Workaround: Each end user must manually set Financial Reporting user preferences when using the Repository for the first time
A known issue with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus patch 16.0.10228.20051 updated through the insider slow channel prevents the use of Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365. This Microsoft patch was pushed to users who signed up for monthly channel updates between June 12 and June 14, 2018.
Workaround: Do not update Microsoft Office 365 with patch 16.0.10228.20051 if you are using Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus. Instead, use Microsoft Office 365 monthly channel Version 1806 (Build 10228.20080), which contains the fix for this issue.