New Features in Oracle Fusion/Cloud Applications Release 8

As announced a few days ago, Oracle has published a new release of its Fusion Applications (ERP, HCM, CRM) product line, namely Release 8.

For on-premise deployments, this means that the installers as well as the new documentation set are now available on Oracle servers.

For cloud customers which have signed up for the Oracle-hosted versions of Fusion Applications (aka Cloud Applications) such as Sales Cloud, Oracle is probably rolling out upgrades already.

The new release brings hundreds of features, with the following (personal) list of highlights:

New Skyros Theme

With release 8, Oracle ships a new skin named "Skyros" (probably inspired by the blue sky and white houses on the Greek island of Skyros).

New Skyros skin in Fusion Release 8

The new skin provides a more "flat" look and feel and will also be available for the accompanying middleware products such as Identity Management or Oracle BI.

Oracle has announced a skin editor for release 9 so customers can create custom skins more easily.

Redesigned Global Header

In addition to the new style, the global header has been redesigned. For example, the Navigator menu is now represented by a compass icon and most administrative links have made it to the menu which opens when you click the user name on the top left.

The new Navigator menu in Release 8.

User Interface Text Editor

For developers, there are many new features, including a UI Text Editor (its place in the Navigator is highlighted in the above screenshot) which allows to search and replace user interface text elements such as labels quickly.

Application Composer

As of release 8, the Application Composer for Sales Cloud/Fusion CRM has a lot of new features including a new Record Type field which allows to filter list of values by application role (any similarities with Siebel state model are purely coincidental).

Fellow blogger and author Richard Bingham has published a very nice series on release 8 features and he also has some references to videos in his post about Application Composer.

Other Enhancements

Among other areas that have been enhanced with release 8 are flexfields (used in ERP and HCM but not Sales Cloud/CRM), the BPM Composer, Auditing and the Simplified UI which is quickly becoming the UI of choice for many users. Developers will be pleased to hear that there is now better support for customizing the Simplified UI via Application Composer.

have a nice day

@lex