Oracle PBCS New Features Sept 2016

Oracle PBCS New Features Sept 2016

It's been a while since I've blogged and now I've resorted to plagerism. Mike Falconer, a fantastic colleague of mine made this lovely round-up of the latest updates in PBCS so Mike, it's over to you...

PBCS is always being updated with new features and bug fixes. We’ve been through the Oracle documentation available here and extracted a simple summary of the best new features in PBCS and how best to utilise them.

Where have all my buttons gone!?

Oracle has a tendency to change their user interfaces for a consistent feel across all their cloud applications. Unfortunately this means that they often switch around their interfaces between updates. Here I’ve tried to document some of the more confusing changes.

Console (1) – Renamed to Application. Sub-menus have been created replacing the awful tabs on the left hand side. These sub-menus will replace the standard buttons at the top of the screen when you are on a page that contains them. Settings (2) has similarly been renamed to Tools.

Downloads (3) – Moved to Your Name in the top right hand corner.

Navigator (4) – Replaced with the 3-line Menu button in the top left-hand corner. You can access almost everything in the application using the new navigator window (see over the page)

Forms (5) – Renamed to Data – but to edit form structures, you still need to go via the Navigator.

Application Management – Split up into two separate sections – backups and snapshot have been renamed Migration (6) and user management and security has been renamed Access Control (7).

Navigation Flow (8) – A great new feature that allows you to change all of the buttons around, to confuse your poor users some more.

Refresh Database –Application->Overview->Actions->Refresh Database(x3)->Refresh. Obviously.

What happened to my dimension editor?

Surely Smart View is safe from the monthly updates? Have no fear, it has not been forgotten. For those that use the Smart View Planning Extension (which should be all of you – it saves you so much time!) to edit dimension metadata, you will now need to use the Member Selection box to get some of the dimension properties that used to appear automatically. It functions in exactly the same way as the Member Selection for regular dimension members. 

Top Tip: The quickest way to refresh the database in PBCS is to right-click the Dimensions folder and click Refresh Database:

Fun Features

Activity Reports

The biggest feature included this month is an activity report, located under Application -> Overview -> Activity. 

These reports are produced daily and have a number of metrics, including user login data, worst performing tasks, and other helpful tools like most/least active users. Perfect for keeping track of your application’s weaknesses and strengths.

External Links to Dashboards and Forms

You can now create yourself a URL which will take a user directly to a form or dashboard they have access to:

https://virtualhost/HyperionPlanning/faces/LogOn?Direct=True&ObjectType=DASHBOARD&ObjectName=DASHBOARDNAME

In the above link, replace virtualhost with your own PBCS link information, and change DASHBOARDNAME to the name of a dashboard in your application.

Clicking on the link will send you directly to that object:

Copy/Paste onto forms in the Simplified Interface!

This one is huge people – you can now use Copy and Paste via Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to copy and paste data into cells on web forms. You can even copy a range of cells from Excel, select a range of cells in the web form, and paste them. What a time to be alive.

Navigation Flow

You can use this functionality to customise the buttons users can or can’t see. You can also define and add new buttons – but they are limited to displaying certain forms or dashboards. We were hoping this feature will be expanded to add links so watch this space! Below you can see I’ve added a Test Flow card. Navigation Flow is certainly in its infancy, but a bigger feature will come in a future update when Oracle flesh the options out a bit.