The March updates for Oracle's Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) and Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (EPBCS) have arrived. There are no new features in this update, but it includes some upcoming changes such as the ability to create new composite forms and a new look and feel to the EPM Cloud.
The monthly update for PBCS and EPBCS will occur on Friday, March 15 during your normal daily maintenance window.
EPBCS Updates
Discontinued Rules
In the Capital business process of Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud, the following rules have been discontinued and replaced with updated rules:
- Calculate All Existing Intangible Assets (OCX_ Calculate All Existing Intangible Assets) – This rule is now obsolete. Use this rule instead: OCX_Calculate Intangible Asset
- Calculate All Existing Tangible Assets (OCX_ Calculate All Existing Tangible Assets) – This rule is now obsolete. Use this rule instead: OCX_Calculate Tangible Assets
Upcoming Changes
EPM Cloud's New Look & Feel
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:
- Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud
- Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud
- Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud
- Oracle Tax Reporting Cloud
- Oracle Profitability and Cost Management Cloud
- Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud
- Oracle Strategic Workforce Planning Cloud
- Oracle Sales Planning Cloud
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.
Changes to the Default Setting for Exporting Smart List Textual Data
Starting with the June update to the service (release 19.06), the default value of Export Planning Smart List textual data during daily maintenance for incremental data import application setting will be changed to No.
The current default value of this setting (Yes) impacts the performance of the daily maintenance process by also exporting text data associated with Smart Lists. The exporting of text data during daily maintenance is required only if you plan to use the daily maintenance snapshot to perform incremental or selective data imports. Because this is not a common customer scenario, Oracle will not, by default, include Smart List text data in the maintenance snapshot. This change ensures improved performance of the daily maintenance process.
NOTE: The snapshot that is created with the Export Planning Smart List textual data during daily maintenance for incremental data import option set to No is a fully contained snapshot that includes all metadata and data required to recreate your application.
If you have a requirement to include Smart List data in the maintenance snapshot for incremental data imports, you must change value of Export Planning Smart List textual data during daily maintenance for incremental data import application setting to Yes.
Removal of Support for Transport Layer Security Protocol 1.0 and 1.1
Starting with the May 2019 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 the 19.05 update on May 3, 2015, 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.
Classic Dimension Editor
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.
Ability to Create New Composite Forms
Oracle will remove the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) starting with the March 2019 update to the service (March 01, 2019 for test environments and March 15, 2019 for production environments). After the March update, all existing composite forms can still be edited and used. Removal of the ability to create composite forms impacts only the creation of new composite forms in the service.
All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. No more enhancements will be made to the composite forms functionality.
You might also be interested in...
