This document describes the new features in Oracle RTD Base Application.
New features in release 3.2 are:
Multiple inline services can be used at the same time with a single Decision Manager instance. One is used for making changes to the choices and the other ones can be used to get data for reports. This way, you can make changes in a development environment while monitoring the performance of a production system.
Additionally, you no longer need to redeploy the Decision Manager application to make changes, you can now do that within the application.
You can now define slices of your choice universe and attach specific permissions to these slices. These slices can overlap and you can specify you can view and edit choices in these slices. You could, for instance, say that part of your campaigns, offers and creatives are editable by one group of people but not by another. Meanwhile, a third group may not even see these choices.
Decision Manager has been localized to the following locales: Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), German, Italian, French, Spanish, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan).
Oracle RTD Decision Manager provides a variety of model reports, both for performance (counts) and model analysis. They are built natively within Decision Manager instead of embedding the Decision Center Reports. As a result, you no longer need to setup SSO between Decision Manager and Decision Center.
The reports available are:
The Performance/Counts report, which covers the functionality of both Performance/Counts and Performance/History of Decision Center model reports.
The Analysis/Overview report, which is a sunburst of a tree map of the model and provides a simple yet powerful view into the model.
The Analysis/Best Fit report, which covers the functionality of the same report in Decision Center.
The Analysis/Drivers report, which covers the functionality of the same report in Decision Center and is easier to read.
The Analysis/Quality report, which covers the functionality of the same report in Decision Center, and a new lift per decile in the table.
We now provide OBIEE dashboards as part of the Decision Analytics RTD platform feature. Decision Manager ships with dashboards specific to the Base Marketing reference implementation. You can embed the out-of-the box dashboards or any dashboard you build within the Decision Manager user interface.
You can now assign weights to performance goals using the performance goal editor widget in Decision Manager.
You can now specify full external rules; that is, rules which are stored in database and loaded at runtime. Full use of external filtering rules and external scoring rules have been incorporated. An example of external scoring rules is the Marketing Priority scoring rule defined for offers in the Base Marketing reference application.
New features of Oracle RTD Base Application Release 3.1.1, all of which relate to Oracle RTD Decision Management applications, include:
Direct Access to Main Repository and Project Audit Trail Information
Applications Can Be Configured with Optional Decision Center Reporting
Multiple Oracle RTD Decision Manager Applications Deployable to Same Domain
Ability to Edit Projects and Their Attributes
You can specify attributes for projects, and set project attribute values during project creation and editing. For instance, the Type attribute has been added to the released Oracle RTD Decision Management application, RTD for Marketing Optimization, which enables you to select Emergency Changes, Incremental Changes, or Structural Changes.
A Details icon has been added to the list of work icons in an Oracle RTD Decision Management application, to enable easy access to the project detail view and edit screens.
See Section 2.2.2.3, "Choice Group, Project, and Relationship-Types XML Files" and Section 2.2.6.1, "Adding an Attribute to a Choice Group or Project" for more information.
Ability to Specify Descriptions for Perspectives
Descriptions for perspectives, when specified, will appear as headings in perspective panels in the Oracle RTD Decision Manager application user interface. They will also appear for mouse hovers over perspective names when users view and select perspectives in the dropdown perspective list.
See Section 2.2.2.2, "Perspectives XML File" for more information.
Support for Many-To-Many Relationships
You can now specify many-to-many relationships between choice groups. Oracle RTD Decision Manager supports required and non-required relationships.
Non-required relationships can have two choice groups, where choices of one type do not have to be associated with any choices of the other type. The Oracle RTD Decision Management application RTD for Marketing Optimization has been enhanced by the addition of the choice group Tag, which has a many-to-many relationship with the choice group Creative. With this relationship, each creative can have multiple tags, and each tag can be associated with many creatives. Creatives do not have to have a tag, and tags do not have to be associated with any creative.
An example of the required relationship type would be between campaigns and products, where each campaign must have at least one product, but a product does not have to be associated with a campaign.
As with other kinds of relationship, many-to-many relationships can be configured to propagate events and rules.
See Section 2.2.2.3, "Choice Group, Project, and Relationship-Types XML Files" for more information.
Folders and Multiple Relationships in Perspective Trees
In the previous release, you could display hierarchical relationships between choice groups as indented nodes in an Oracle RTD Decision Management application perspective panel tree. In this release, you can now define multiple relationships at each node of the hierarchy tree. You can display multiple relationships under a node with or without the use of a folder to group each set of related choices.
For example, marketing collateral documents could have many authors and refer to several competitors. In an Oracle RTD Decision Manager application perspective panel, with the extra folders showing, this could appear as:
Central Region Release Collateral
Has Author
(and under this, many individual authors)
Has Competitor
(and under this, many different competitors)
See Section 2.2.2.2, "Perspectives XML File" for more information.
Configurable Pages Layout and Sequence
In the previous release, while the pages which displayed for choice creation, editing, or viewing varied according to the choice attributes, the pages (and sequence of pages) were generated automatically and were not configurable.
In this release, the content, layout, and sequence of the pages is explicitly defined through metadata associated with the choices and projects.This also enables user-specific choice lifecycle management as pages also have role-based permissions.
See Section 2.2.2.4, "User Interface Pages" for more information.
Default Values for Choice and Project Attributes
You can specify default values for choice and project attributes, which appear on Oracle RTD Decision Manager application pages as you create new choices and projects.
The type of values supported are string, number, date. They can be set at design time in metadata, or at run time by having a Groovy expression in metadata.
This feature is complementary to the fact that choice attributes can have default values defined in the associated Inline Service.
See Section 2.2.2.3, "Choice Group, Project, and Relationship-Types XML Files" for more information.
Image Widget to Visualize Associated Content
For enhanced visual displays of choices and projects in Oracle RTD Decision Manager applications, you can specify image widgets for choice or project attributes. This enables the images to appear when the choice or project is opened in view mode. For example, when viewing a creative in the Oracle RTD Decision Management application RTD for Marketing Optimization, you can visualize the image associated with the content in the CMS repository which will be presented to the end user from the CMS repository. This provides a consistent end-user view across all channels.
See Section 2.2.2.3, "Choice Group, Project, and Relationship-Types XML Files" for more information.
You can create your own widgets and associate them with choice or project attributes. All the Oracle RTD Decision Manager widgets now use this framework. By using this framework, custom widgets will be safeguarded during Oracle RTD Decision Manager upgrades.
You can use Decision Designer to customize the behavior of Oracle RTD Decision Manager applications by adding your own logic. The two ways to achieve customization are through extensibility of the ADF Framework and through the Oracle RTD Decision Manager templates.
Direct Access to Main Repository and Project Audit Trail Information
An Audit Trail icon has been added to the Main Repository/Project context area in the Oracle RTD Decision Manager application, to enable easier access to audit trail information for the environment in which you are working.
If you have selected to view the Main Repository only, clicking Audit Trail will display audit trail information for objects in the Main Repository. If you are working in a project, clicking Audit Trail will display audit trail information for objects in the current project.
Support for WebSphere Application Server
In this release, you can choose whether to deploy and run production Oracle RTD Decision Manager applications under WebSphere Application Server or WebLogic.
See Section 1.1, "Installation Overview" for more information, and also sections specific to WebSphere or WebLogic in Chapter 1, "Installing Oracle RTD Decision Management."
Applications Can Be Configured with Optional Decision Center Reporting
In this release, you can choose whether to enable Decision Center reporting from the Oracle RTD Decision Manager application. With Decision Center reporting enabled, Performance and Analysis tabs appear in the main choice details area of the Oracle RTD Decision Manager application user interface. If Decision Center reporting is not enabled, these tabs do not appear.
See Section 2.2.2.1, "Config XML File" for more information.
Decision Center reporting is only supported with homogenous application server deployments. Additionally, SSO must be configured between Oracle RTD Decision Manager and Decision Center.
Heterogeneous topologies are supported, but without Decision Center reports integration within Oracle RTD Decision Manager.
Multiple Oracle RTD Decision Manager Applications Deployable to Same Domain
In this release, you can now deploy many Oracle RTD Decision Manager applications to the same domain.
See Section 2.2.2.1, "Config XML File" for more information.