Oracle® Retail Home

Release Notes

Release 19.0.001.1

F29919-01

March 2020

This document highlights the major changes for Release 19.0.001.1 of Oracle Retail Home.

Overview

A key tenet of Modern Retailing is simplification. And a primary form of simplification within this context is easing the process by which retailers gain insights from their data and take actions in their applications, further expediting insight-to-action loops. After all, from inventory analyst to planner to marketer, many retail roles involve navigating through a wealth of operational and analytical applications, drilling on KPI's, addressing notifications, and more. Web portals exist to bring information from diverse sources together in a uniform way. Oracle Retail users can benefit from a specially designed Web portal that consolidates access to data and applications in a role-specific manner.

In this spirit, Oracle Retail Home has been built as a single access point. This simplifies our users' interactions with the data and applications that are most relevant to their roles, and better empowers them to anticipate informed actions and to inspire engagement.

Based on a robust and flexible portal framework, and populated with thousands of pre-integrated metrics from the Oracle Retail Insights Suite, which incorporates the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities of Oracle Retail Science Platform, Retail Home is intended first to provide timely and role-specific high-level insights, and second to enable selective drilling into relevant applications for more details.

Upon login, Oracle Retail Home begins with a tile-based dashboard that highlights select KPI's across applications. Note that each login can have multiple roles, and each tile can contain up to five tile states, highlighting different KPIs, displaying graphs, favorite actions and notifications. Tile clicks can launch related applications, potentially with a single sign-on and with context, and you can also expand the tile to reveal deeper insights, including more detailed reports. Each role can have any number and configuration of tiles, and each tile can have any number of states. Tiles can also be configured to be of a larger size, to fit more data.

There is also a configurable banner and side pane. For the banner, one might configure a scrolling KPI ticker, based on those of most interest to the respective role or roles. For the side pane, one might, for example, surface reports showing the latest Top 10 items, by margin, sales and units, and by channel. And links, filtered to the latest and most applicable news might be of interest as well.

Oracle Retail Home brings together the most insightful data and applications per role in your retail enterprise, with a sophisticated and flexible, yet simple, user experience.

Oracle Retail Cloud Services and Business Agility

Oracle Retail Home is hosted in the Oracle Cloud with the security features inherent to Oracle technology and a robust data center classification, providing significant uptime. The Oracle Cloud team is responsible for installing, monitoring, patching, and upgrading retail software.

Included in the service is continuous technical support, access to software feature enhancements, hardware upgrades, and disaster recovery. The Cloud Service model helps to free customer IT resources from the need to perform these tasks, giving retailers greater business agility to respond to changing technologies and to perform more value-added tasks focused on business processes and innovation.

Oracle Retail Software Cloud Service is acquired exclusively through a subscription service (SaaS) model. This shifts funding from a capital investment in software to an operational expense. Subscription-based pricing for retail applications offers flexibility and cost effectiveness.

Client System Requirements

The following technology is supported:

Browser Support

n Mozilla Firefox ESR 60+

n Microsoft Internet Explorer 11

n Microsoft Edge 44+

n Google Chrome (Desktop) 73+

Enhancements

The enhancements below are included in this release.

Domain Removal

Domains are no longer created and maintained in Retail Home; instead, configuration is done at the application level.

Impact

Any configuration you specify at the domain level will be ignored - it must be specified by application instead. There may be some impact to configuration steps. See the Administration Guide for more information.

Seed Known Applications

Retail Home now includes a seeded list of known RGBU cloud applications, and provides a way to specify URLs for these applications at configuration time.

Streamlined Configuration UI

The configuration UI has been updated to reduce URL duplication in application, dashboard, and tile configuration.

Retail Insights Support for 4/6 Metric Tiles

4/6 metric tiles on the dashboard now support data coming from Retail Insights.

Dashboard Configuration from PSRAF

Retail Home now supports pulling Dashboard configurations from a connected application's PSRAF services. This allows application teams to preload their JSON dashboard configurations into their own RAF schema and have Retail Home pull that configuration when the application is set up or refreshed in Retail Home.

Impact

Older configuration methods still work for now, but eventually application teams should package configuration JSON to set up dashboards instead of using SQL scripts or other configuration methods

Convert Jetty Authenticator to Directly Call IDCS

The Docker deployment of Retail Home now calls IDCS directly instead of through the PSRAF identity service. This is one step toward removing Retail Home's dependency on an external PSRAF instance.

Impact

A wallet containing IDCS credentials must be provided to the Retail Home container at startup time.

Totals Chart to Support Negative Data

The totals chart in Retail Home dashboard tiles now handles negative data input gracefully.

Bug Fixes

n Login issues caused by a "headers too large" error in Retail Home's Docker deployment have been fixed.

n When publishing Application Navigator changes, Retail Home now removes duplicate App Navigator entries it had previously created.

n Retail Home now displays the correct error message when stale data errors are encountered.

n Various UI layout issues have been fixed.

Known Issues

The known issues described below remain in this release.

Table 1 Known Issues
Known Issue/Defect	Defect Number
The Docker container deployment of Retail Home is not compatible with GBUCS 1.0 environments, as these environments do not use IDCS for authentication, which is required by the Retail Home Docker container.	N/A
In some cases when stale data is encountered from a platform services call, the error message is still incorrect in the Retail Home UI. This will be fixed in a future release of platform services.	N/A

Related Documentation

For more information, see the following documents in the Oracle Retail Home documentation set:

n Oracle Retail Home User Guide

n Oracle Retail Home Administration Guide

n Oracle Retail Home Security Guide

Documentation Accessibility

For information about Oracle's commitment to accessibility, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program website at http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=docacc.

Access to Oracle Support

Oracle customers that have purchased support have access to electronic support through My Oracle Support. For information, visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=info or visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=trs if you are hearing impaired.

Oracle Retail Home Release Notes, Release 19.0.001.1

F29919-01

This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.

The information contained herein is subject to change without notice and is not warranted to be error-free. If you find any errors, please report them to us in writing.

If this is software or related documentation that is delivered to the U.S. Government or anyone licensing it on behalf of the U.S. Government, then the following notice is applicable:

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This software or hardware is developed for general use in a variety of information management applications. It is not developed or intended for use in any inherently dangerous applications, including applications that may create a risk of personal injury. If you use this software or hardware in dangerous applications, then you shall be responsible to take all appropriate fail-safe, backup, redundancy, and other measures to ensure its safe use. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates disclaim any liability for any damages caused by use of this software or hardware in dangerous applications.

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This software or hardware and documentation may provide access to or information about content, products, and services from third parties. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates are not responsible for and expressly disclaim all warranties of any kind with respect to third-party content, products, and services unless otherwise set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates will not be responsible for any loss, costs, or damages incurred due to your access to or use of third-party content, products, or services, except as set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle.

Licensing Note: This media pack includes a Restricted Use license for Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) - Enterprise Engine to support Oracle® Retail Analytic Parameter Calculator for Regular Price Optimization only.

Value-Added Reseller (VAR) Language

Oracle Retail VAR Applications

The following restrictions and provisions only apply to the programs referred to in this section and licensed to you. You acknowledge that the programs may contain third party software (VAR applications) licensed to Oracle. Depending upon your product and its version number, the VAR applications may include:

(i) the MicroStrategy Components developed and licensed by MicroStrategy Services Corporation (MicroStrategy) of McLean, Virginia to Oracle and imbedded in the MicroStrategy for Oracle Retail Data Warehouse and MicroStrategy for Oracle Retail Planning & Optimization applications.

(ii) the Wavelink component developed and licensed by Wavelink Corporation (Wavelink) of Kirkland, Washington, to Oracle and imbedded in Oracle Retail Mobile Store Inventory Management.

(iii) the software component known as Access Via™ licensed by Access Via of Seattle, Washington, and imbedded in Oracle Retail Signs and Oracle Retail Labels and Tags.

(iv) the software component known as Adobe Flex™ licensed by Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, California, and imbedded in Oracle Retail Promotion Planning & Optimization application.

You acknowledge and confirm that Oracle grants you use of only the object code of the VAR Applications. Oracle will not deliver source code to the VAR Applications to you. Notwithstanding any other term or condition of the agreement and this ordering document, you shall not cause or permit alteration of any VAR Applications. For purposes of this section, “alteration” refers to all alterations, translations, upgrades, enhancements, customizations or modifications of all or any portion of the VAR Applications including all reconfigurations, reassembly or reverse assembly, re-engineering or reverse engineering and recompilations or reverse compilations of the VAR Applications or any derivatives of the VAR Applications. You acknowledge that it shall be a breach of the agreement to utilize the relationship, and/or confidential information of the VAR Applications for purposes of competitive discovery.

The VAR Applications contain trade secrets of Oracle and Oracle's licensors and Customer shall not attempt, cause, or permit the alteration, decompilation, reverse engineering, disassembly or other reduction of the VAR Applications to a human perceivable form. Oracle reserves the right to replace, with functional equivalent software, any of the VAR Applications in future releases of the applicable program.