Release Notes
Release 7.5
E54093-07
December 2019
This document describes new features and known problems (including any workarounds) for Oracle Communications Billing Care 7.5 Patch Set 17 through Billing Care 7.5 Patch Set 23.
Billing Care 7.5 Patch Set 23 includes the following enhancements:
View Bills Generated Before Moving the Account to a Hierarchy
Support for Account Number and Bill Number in Billing Care Embeddable URLs
Embeddable URLs for Purchase Package and Purchase Bundle Screens
You can now use the Billing Care SDK and OPSS policies to perform the following in Billing Care:
Customize reason codes displayed for event adjustments.
Limit the adjustment percentage entered by customer service representatives (CSRs) for event adjustments.
Disable the event adjustment options based on user roles.
Restrict debit and credit adjustment options for event adjustments.
Make the Notes field mandatory for additional product purchase and event adjustments.
Display only event adjustments in the Bills section for performing adjustments.
Restrict the purchase of additional bundles based on user roles.
Restrict the validity or end date set by the CSRs while purchasing additional products or services.
Set the maximum adjustment limit based on the currency resources used for event adjustments.
Filter the bundles available for purchase.
Filter start and end dates for additional purchase.
Disable the Charges not related to services link and the link to child accounts in the Bills tab, My Charges area, and Payment Details dialog box.
Hide bill units and the service icon displayed in Assets card and disable Actions menu.
Customize the Bills Graph and Balances sections that display in the center section of the Home tab.
Separate the amount and percentage fields in the Event Adjustment dialog box.
For more information, see Billing Care SDK Guide.
In previous releases, when an account was moved to a hierarchy as a child account, the bills generated for the account earlier were not displayed in the bills list.
With this enhancement, you can view the bills that are generated before and after moving the account to a hierarchy in the account's Bills > Switch Bills menu. For more information, see the discussion about switch bills in the Billing Care Online Help.
In the previous releases, only account ID and bill ID were supported in the Billing care embeddable URLs.
With this enhancement, you can also use account number and bill number instead of the corresponding POIDs in Billing Care URLs that are embedded in external applications.
For more information, see the discussion about embedding billing care screens in Billing Care SDK Guide.
Billing Care supports embedding screens into CRM applications and online account management interfaces to directly access the Billing Care functionality.
With this enhancement, you can embed Purchase Package and Purchase Bundle screens into external applications.
For more information, see the discussion about embedding Billing Care screens in Billing Care SDK Guide.
Billing Care now allows you to backdate the account creation and product purchase. You can now enter or select an account creation date or a product purchase date that is earlier than the current date.
For more information on this enhancement, see the Billing Care Online Help.
You can now use SAML to enable single-sign on (SSO) in Billing Care. SSO allows you to log in to applications using a single user name and password combination.
For more information, see the discussion about configuring SAML for SSO in Billing Care Installation Guide.
Billing Care 7.5 Patch Set 22 includes the following enhancement:
You can now customize the Purchase deal configuration, add custom fields, and customize the Assets area to display the custom fields by using the Billing Care SDK. For example, this SDK allows you hide notes, fields, and the purchase start date or end date in the Purchase Catalogue screen and view the newly added custom fields in the Assets area.
For more information on customizing Billing Care to customize purchase deal configuration and assets action menu, see Billing Care SDK Guide.
Billing Care 7.5 Patch Set 19 includes the following enhancements:
Support for Testing Authorizations in the Billing Care Test Installation
Support for Viewing List of Child Accounts from the Parent Account
In previous releases, the customer account search returned only a maximum of 50 results per page.
You can now enhance the account search experience by increasing or decreasing the number of search results to be returned per page.
By default, the account search returns only a maximum of 50 results per page. You can increase or decrease the maximum number of results to be returned per page by setting the accountsearch.limit entry in the custom version of your Configurations.xml file.
Note:
The account search limit value should be a non-zero positive number.For more information on setting the accountsearch.limit entry, see Oracle Communications Billing Care SDK Guide.
In previous releases, while searching for users (for example, users with permission to manage suspended payments), Billing Care retrieved all the users that were in the external directory at once and used it internally for the search. If there was a large number of users in the directory, the performance of the external user search was affected.
You can now improve the external user search performance by specifying the number of users to be retrieved per batch. When a user search is performed, Billing Care now retrieves only the specified number of users per batch internally. The default value is 500. You can change the number of users to be retrieved per batch by setting the users.batchsize entry in the custom version of your Configurations.xml file.
For more information on setting the users.batchsize entry, see Oracle Communications Billing Care SDK Guide.
In previous releases, you could not test authorizations in the Billing Care test installation because Oracle Entitlements Server (OES) was not used by the test installation.
You can now test authorizations in the Billing Care test installation without using OES. You can perform this by customizing the Billing Care test installation to enable authorization without OES.
For more information on customizing the Billing Care test installation by using the Billing Care SDK, see Oracle Communications Billing Care SDK Guide.
By default, Billing Care does not display the list of child accounts from the parent account. You can now customize Billing Care to display the list of child accounts in the Organization Hierarchy screen of the parent account by using the Billing Care SDK. This lets you view the list of child accounts and also navigate to the child accounts from the organization hierarchy of the parent account.
For more information on customizing Billing Care to display the list of child accounts from the parent account, see Oracle Communications Billing Care SDK Guide.
Billing Care 7.5 Patch Set 18 includes the following enhancement:
You can now use custom search criteria to filter suspended payments. This enables you to customize the suspended payment search based on your business requirements.
You can use the Billing Care SDK to make the necessary customization for adding custom search criteria in Payment, Suspense, and Account groups.
For more information on configuring Billing Care to customize search filter for suspended payments, see Oracle Communications Billing Care SDK Guide.
Billing Care 7.5 Patch Set 17 includes the following enhancements:
For more information about these enhancements, see Oracle Communications Billing Care Online Help.
When viewing an account's bill unit, you can generate an immediate bill containing a subscriber's current bill-in-progress charges by using Bill Now.
When you search for an account by a particular service ID, the asset associated with that service ID is automatically displayed when you open the account from the search results.
You can now manage subscriber services, bundles, account status life cycles, and assets directly when viewing accounts in Billing Care. Use Billing Care to perform the following actions when viewing an account:
Purchase and configure services and bundles from the catalog
Deactivate and reactivate services
Cancel plans, deals, and products
Inactivate products and discounts
View detailed asset information
User experience enhancements in Billing Care include the following:
Support for 1024-pixel-width screens
Better Bill tab navigation
Improved account creation flow, including payment setup screen
Improved menu process for closing an account view
Readable service names in account view
Copy-and-paste and data export functionality for tables
Enhanced notes for payments originating from external sources
More information displayed:
Amount due for payment suspense accounts
Audit trail for reversed payments
Version number in the Help menu
Cycle dates for displayed charges and usage
You can now assign accounts to an organization hierarchy to configure relationships among accounts and functional roles for accounts. Organization hierarchies enable you to create and view a relational and graphical structure among accounts managed in Billing Care.
Configure billing hierarchies to enable a parent account to assume financial responsibility for the bill units of one or more child accounts. When accounts are linked in a billing hierarchy, the parent account pays the child account's bill unit charges.
If Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) is enabled in your Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) system, you can now use the asset card action menu to transition services from one custom service life cycle state to another.
For more information, see the discussion about working with account assets in Oracle Communications Billing Care Online Help.
You can now use Billing Care to perform the following payment operations:
Distribute single payments across multiple subscriber accounts
Post payments, including suspended payments, to one or more accounts
Upload and manage batch payment files from payment processors such as banks to update account balances in bulk transactions
Refund payments at the bill level
Use the Billing Care SDK to expose custom actions in the payment actions menu
You can now select custom invoice templates when creating or updating an account's financial information. This enables you to use different invoice templates for various business requirements. For example, select different templates for different customer segments or when creating rerated invoices.
You configure custom invoice templates in BRM and then use the Billing Care SDK to make the necessary customizations for including custom templates in the bill unit invoice drop-down list.
For more information on designing invoices, see Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Designing and Generating Invoices.
For more information on configuring Billing Care to display custom invoice templates, see Oracle Communications Billing Care SDK Guide.
This section describes known problems in the current release.
When Single Sign-On (SSO) with Oracle Identity and Access Management Lifecycle Management is implemented for your Billing Care environment, users are redirected to the Billing Care login screen after authenticating in the SSO login screen.
Workaround: On each OES Client domain where Billing Care is deployed:
Comment out the <variable-definition> and <module-override> entries in the Middleware_home/setup/Plan.xml file as shown below, where Middleware_home is the WebLogic home directory on the OES Client domain host of the user who installed Billing Care.
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<deployment-plan xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/deployment-plan" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/deployment-plan http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/deployment-plan/1.0/deployment-plan.xsd" global-variables="false">
<application-name>BillingCare.war</application-name>
<!--<variable-definition>
<variable>
<name>CONFIG_SSL_REDIRECT</name>
<value>CONFIDENTIAL</value>
</variable>
</variable-definition>
<module-override>
<module-name>BillingCare.war</module-name>
<module-type>war</module-type>
<module-descriptor external="true">
<root-element>web-app</root-element>
<uri>WEB-INF/web.xml</uri>
<variable-assignment>
<name>CONFIG_SSL_REDIRECT</name>
<xpath>/web-app/security-constraint/user-data-constraint/transport-guarantee</xpath>
</variable-assignment>
</module-descriptor>
</module-override> -->
</deployment-plan>
Restart the domain.
The Plan.xml file deployed by the Billing Care Oracle Universal Installer enables mandatory use of an SSL-enabled port when connecting with all browsers. Firefox and Internet Explorer may fail to connect to Billing Care, producing a secure connection failure error.
Workaround: For Firefox, no workaround exists. For Internet Explorer, start a Command Prompt session with administrative rights, and run the following command before launching Internet Explorer:
certutil -setreg chain\EnableWeakSignatureFlags 8
If an allocation is done from parent account to child account, the Payment Applied link in the Bills section does not work from the child account.
Workaround: Access the payment allocation details from the child account as follows:
In the News Feed.
In the Bills chart, by clicking the indicator for the bill that received the payment allocation.
In the payment allocation flow, by clicking the Payment details link in the Allocate Payment dialog box.
Through the parent account.
When the usage event rated through Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) is adjusted, including the tax, the tax amount is not considered in the adjustment.
Workaround: Not available.
Billing Care supports settling bill-level disputes created in Billing Care only. Billing Care cannot resolve disputes of any level created in Customer Center and instead displays a message.
Workaround: Use Customer Center to create and settle item- and event-level disputes for any bill that has a dispute created in Customer Center.
When a bill contains /item/cycle_tax charges, Billing Care enables options to perform adjustment allocations, item adjustments, or event adjustments. If the actions are attempted, however, an error message is displayed.
Workaround: Not available.
Billing Care documentation is available from Oracle Help Center:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E39513_01/index.htm
Oracle Communications Billing Care Java API Reference is included in the BRM Developer Documentation media available on the Oracle software delivery Web site:
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Oracle Communications Billing Care Release Notes, Release 7.5
E54093-07
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