Oracle Utilities Application Framework 24.3.0.0.0 (24C)

Introduction

I am pleased to announce the availability of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework 24C (24.3.0.0.0) release exclusively for cloud customers. This release builds upon past releases to offer new and updated functionality for Oracle Energy and Water customers. Functionality included in this release will be included in a planned future release that is also available to on-premises, Infrastructure As A Service and Platform As A Service customers, unless it is considered exclusive to Oracle Utilities Cloud Services.

Note: As per the last release, the year of release will feature as the prefix of the version number. This has been implemented across the Oracle Energy and Water portfolio as part of releases going forward.

As with all releases, it is recommended to refer to the release notes and online documentation available from Oracle Help Center for details of each of these new features or enhancements and their impact on your extensions, if any.

User Experience Changes

As the Oracle Energy and Water solutions transition to the Oracle Redwood user experience, new and improved features are introduced to improve the overall user experience. In this release these include:

Application Toolbar optimization

In this release, the application toolbar (a.k.a. application header) has been optimized to allow for more space for data in the service and to confirm to the directions outlined by Oracle Redwood.

This enhancement not opt-out as it is the baseline for the changes ahead. This new experience includes the following features:

• Smaller footprint. The application toolbar has been reduced in size, made thinner, to allow for more content to appear in portals and zones.
• Single menu system. The application toolbar now features a single comprehensive single menu that uses the Redwood standard menu experience. This consolidates the Main and Administration menus as well as Favorites and Bookmarks into a consistent experience. The menu is more usable, consolidates actions and the menu state is persisted within a session.
• Simpler navigation. The navigation now mirrors the common navigation experience used by modern browsers with a single back and forward set of icons. As with the browser, hold any of the icons will show the relevant history negating the need for a dedicated history icon. In the long term, these icons will be delegated to the browser rather than within the service.
• Consolidated Identity. The Product Name and, if used, the Domain name are now consolidated.
• Product specific icons. For some services, additional icons are shown on the toolbar for quick reference to important functions in that service.
• Unified Search. The unified search has been retained and repositioned for quick use.
• Icon bar. The icon bar for the home page, sidebar toggle, help, and user avatar are consolidated. The sidebar icon will change to correspond to the position of the sidebar.
• Redwood menus. The application toolbar includes Redwood style menus that provide easier navigation and improved accessibility support. The menu now remembers where you are within a session to reduce repeated navigation when not selecting a menu item. The menu system now consolidates the main menu, administration menu, user favorites, and user bookmarks (if used).

• Responsive to screen resolution. The application toolbar has been optimized to cater for a wider range of resolutions to resize or remove elements as necessary to accommodate screen resolution while retaining functionality.

Switch Language is only displayed when appropriate

To further improve the Sidebar experience, the Switch Language zone is only displayed for authorized users when more than one language is enabled on the environment.

Batch Changes

Over the last few releases, the Batch submission and execution architecture have undergone major changes to reduce costs and improve batch workload consistency. In this release several changes to batch have been implemented including:

Improved prioritization support in cloud execution architecture

In past releases of the batch execution architecture that is exclusive to the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services, when two or more or jobs were scheduled or executed together, equal priority was given to each job. In this release, the Batch Resource Group, introduced in past releases, is now used to allocate resources appropriately, if configured.

New Batch Control Maintenance

A new and improved Batch Control maintenance portal has been introduced to replace the legacy Batch Control maintenance feature. This will allow customers and partners to maintain their Batch Controls in a more consistent and more efficient manner. This new portal includes the following enhancements:

• New improved main zone. The main section now only includes the important information about the batch control and other information is now surfaced in other zones on the portal.
• Improved description inheritance. If the batch control is based upon a template control, information from that template control is also included in the entry to reduce the need for navigation to the template.
• Improved management of parameters. The maintenance of batch parameters associated with a batch control has been streamlined to provide a concise set of information about parameters and distinguish between common parameters and batch control specific parameters.
• Consistency with other portals. Over the last few releases, maintenance portals have standardized the user experience with consistent views of data and more efficient maintenance techniques. This has been adopted for this portal as well including improved management of algorithms etc.
• Level of service is now available upon demand. In past releases, the level of service was automatically calculated when the batch control was loaded. This was inefficient depending on the level of service calculated. This information can now be requested from the page on-demand.
• Plug-In batch improvements. With the popularity of low code batch processing, the display has been improved to show information about record selection algorithms, process record algorithms, and upload algorithms.
• Improved Cross Reference. As with all new maintenance portals, the cross-reference information has been improved to show additional details to aid in impact analysis for enhancements, patches, and upgrades.
• Option Support. In this release new options have been added to the Batch Control to allow for improved analytics and behavior parameters. As with other option maintenance, the valid options are shown for Batch Controls.

Improved Batch Thread Display

In the Batch Run Portal, the Accumulate All Instances setting is now considered when displaying summary information for threads.

Insight Group Changes

Insights were introduced to provide products and customers new ways of expressing data and process. With that implementation Insight Groups were introduced to group a set of related insights to improve efficiency and reuse. In this release several changes to Insight Groups have been implemented to provide additional functionality.

Insights within Insight Groups can be sorted ?

In this release, the Insight Group definition has been enhanced to allow sorting of insights within a group based upon severity category and sequence. This allows for more important insights to be more prominent, if necessary.

Determine Insight Group by Action Method

In this release it is now possible to specify multiple insight groups via insight classes and have which one(s) are active based upon Action Method. As of this release, action method rules may be used to determine the insight class to use when multiple are defined for an insight class. This is designed to improve reusability of Insight Groups.

CMA Changes

Content Migration Assistant is a key tool for migrating configuration and test data support redaction and obfuscation of key data as necessary. In this release several key enhancements are implemented.

Use of export filename in Worklist

In this release, the file name is used as the identifier in the worklist to improve efficiency via better identification when using worklists for working with multiple Migration Data Set Exports.

New No Records Selected state

In previous releases, if because of the configured criteria used in a Migration Data Set Export, no records were found then the export was marked in Error. In this release, if this condition occurs, the Migration Data Set Export is marked as No Records Selected, to avoid confusion.

To Do Changes

Note: Changes outlined in this section apply to the set of new portals and dashboards available in past releases. These changes do not impact legacy To Do functionality.

Over the last few releases, the To Do functionality has been improved to reduce the costs of managing To Do Entries as outlined in the Effective To Do Management (Doc Id: 3033779.1) available in My Oracle Support.

In this release, several new changes have been implemented to improve efficiency.

Standardize providing comments for To Do Entries

In past releases, the places, and methods of providing user defined comments to annotate To Do Entries has been limited and inconsistent. In this release, the dialog for adding comments has been standardized and is now consistent used in several areas including:

To Do Entry maintenance. The To Do Entry maintenance has been enhanced to add a comment as part of the following functions:

• The edit action has been extended to allow comments to be added via the Add User Log Entry.
• If the To Do Entry has related To Do Entries, the Complete action will ask for comments, showing the current comments related to the entry. The update action has been enhanced to also include comments.

To Do Management. The To Do Management portal has been enhanced to allow users to add comments from this portal directly including:

• The Complete action now prompts for comments.
• The Update action has been enhanced to call the common comments dialog.

Current To Do sidebar zone. As with the other portals and zones mentioned the Current To Do sidebar prompts for comments on the Complete or Complete All actions.

Improved Filters on To Do Dashboard

In this release, the To Do Dashboard has been enhanced to add a filter chips zone at the top of the dashboard. This allows central management of the filter values and allowing users to remove filters more easily. For example:

General Changes

With each release there are several enhancements that are general in nature. In this release the following changes have been implemented.

Improved large attachment support

In this release, Oracle Utilities Cloud Services customers can configure an Object Storage location and size tolerance for large attachments. When uploading the attachment, if the tolerance is exceeded then the attachment will be placed on Object Storage and a link to the file automatically used as the attachment reference. This enhancement allows cloud customers the flexibility of deciding the best storage mechanism to use for their large attachments.

Note: Customers must use Object Storage capabilities to manage the storage and lifecycle of attachments stored in Object Storage. This is exclusive to using Object Storage on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Field encryption via Key Ring

In this release, the field encryption Feature Configuration has been extended to support key rings to define your encryption parameters to improve consistency and improved key rotation. As part of this enhancement additional changes have been implemented including:

• AES Key Ring. A new AES based keyring Business Object has been provided to allow customers and partner to setup AES based symmetric key rings for field encryption.
• HMAC Key Ring. ?A new key ring business object has been provided to allow customers to configure HMAC hash keyrings for search purposes.
• New Batch Control. A new batch control has been implemented to allow customers to initially encrypt data using the definition and to be able to synchronize encryption when keys are rotated as required.

Improved product use metrics for license compliance

In the last release, an object to collect license metrics and other product metrics was introduced. In this release, additional objects and a basic product metrics dashboard are provided to be collected by Oracle for tracking license compliance. For Oracle Utilities Cloud Services customers, the collection of metrics is performed at the service level automatically.

CSS as Managed Content

The Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is used to help decide how elements including colors, icons, fonts, and styles are rendered for the user experience. In past releases, to implement custom extensions to the CSS utilized a file based css file. In this release, it is now possible to have the custom CSS content housed in a Managed Content file, allowing cloud customers the ability to optimize the experience, if desired. This means the style sheet can be managed and migrated with other extensions using tools such as Content Migration Assistant and Revision Control.

Note: Use of a custom style sheet may degrade accessibility compliance of the product/service.

New internal property available

A new configuration property, isProductionLive, is now available that indicates that the service or installation is live and in production. This allows products and services to restrict features not designed for production use after go-live. The new property is controlled by Oracle for Oracle Utilities Cloud Services. On-premises, IaaS and PaaS installations can control the parameter via authorized administrators.

Redaction Rules can apply to logs

It is now possible that configured Redaction Rules can be applied to log file entries to protect information configured in the rule. This allows implementations to apply consistent rules across data usage. This requires the isProductionLive property to be set to true.

From address now configurable

In past releases, the from address was dynamic and needed to be populated each time the Email API was used. In this release, it is possible to configure a static address on the adapter to reduce maintenance costs.

OCI Email Service support

By default, emails sent from the service use an internal email service within the service. This service has been configured and scaled for internal communications only. In this release it is possible to use OCI Email Service, purchased separately, for more scalable and efficient customer email correspondence. This enhancement only applies to cloud customers using the OCI Email Service. On-premises customers can configure external services using the adapter as in past releases.

Improved What's New Portal

Over the last few releases, the provisioning of patch information has been consistently improved for better impact analysis purposes. In this release, a new What's New Portal is available to provide information about patches installed on your environment with some cross reference information. Patches with this release will include extra information that will be visible to this portal to help customers understand what is installed on their services and products. In future releases, this information will be connected to the cross-reference information in your extensions to provide better impact analysis tools for customers and partners.

Note: Due to the patching policies of Oracle, only patches from this release onwards will have this additional information. Past patches may or may not appear in the portal.

Note: This enhancement is currently exclusive to Oracle Utilities Cloud Services.

Technical paper changes

As with each release the technical papers are updated with the latest advice and practices available from My Oracle Support. In this release the changes can be summarized as follows:

• Web Services Best Practices (Doc Id: 2214375.1). This document has been enhanced with new advice and includes new sections on how to design REST services in line with the product provided services.
• Batch Best Practices (Doc Id: 836362.1). This document has been enhanced with new advice and a section outlining the threadpools available on the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services.
• Technical Best Practices (Doc Id: 560367.1). This document has been enhanced with new advice and sections on Generalized Data Export, Unified Auditing, database statistics calculation, style sheet customization guidelines and use of Server Roles.
• Software Configuration Management Series (Doc Id: 560401.1). This document has been enhanced with new advice and how to improve patch management.
• Effective To Do Management (Doc Id: 3033779.1). This document has been enhanced with the latest features.

Conclusion

The releases of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework continue to bring new and updated features for Oracle Energy and Water products to provide the necessary features, lower costs of implementation, and improve customer satisfaction.??????????????? ???????????????

For more information about these capabilities, refer to the documentation provided with the products and services on the Oracle Help Center.