Oracle® Retail Home

Release Notes

Release 19.0.001.9

 

F33192-01

August 2020

This document highlights the major changes for Release 19.0.001.9 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.

In-Tile Filtering

Retail Home has added tile-level filters to metric tiles. This functionality allows integrated applications to define sets of filter attributes for their metric tiles, and allows users to choose values for these filters that are stored for them, allowing them to tailor the tiles to the work they need to do.

Impact

The installer will no longer need a reference to an external PSRAF instance. There are new installer properties required to properly configure the embedded PSRAF instance.

 

JRAF 8.3.0 Uptake

Retail Home now uses version 8.3.0 of JRAF and JET.

PSRAF 1.9.2.4 Uptake

Retail Home now embeds version 1.9.2.4 of Platform Services.

Version Set in Build

Retail Home has removed the ability to change the displayed version number at deploy time, making it easier to understand which version of Retail Home is deployed.

Proxy Service Calls through the Retail Home Server

In order to work around an issue with WTSS that causes it to not supply CORS headers on redirects to IDCS, Retail Home now has the ability to send all traffic intended for remove applications through the Retail Home server. This avoids CORS altogether. This option may be set at install time, and defaults to sending all traffic through the server.

Support for OAS 5.5

Retail Home now has the ability to integrate with OAS 5.5 when integrating with Retail Insights. As part of this change, Retail Home can now also use an IDCS-protected endpoint to connect to Retail Insights.

Mobile Layout Changes

The way Retail Home is rendered when displayed on a mobile-sized screen has been improved for better mobile usability. 2x2 tiles now resize themselves to be one space wide and as many spaces tall as needed to display all information, making scrolling through dashboard tiles much easier.

Bug Fixes

n        An issue with the Retail Home seeding script causing applications to appear in the Application Navigator and Favorites area even when they were not purchased by a customer has been fixed.

n        An issue with Application Navigator that caused errors when integrating with other applications has been fixed.

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 where 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

When the proxying service makes calls through the Retail Home server, an occasional network performance issue has been encountered that causes some requests to fail. The proxy functionality will be disabled by default when installing Retail Home, and the issue will be addressed in an upcoming patch.

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 19.0.001.9

F33192-01

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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.

This documentation is in preproduction status and is intended for demonstration and preliminary use only. It may not be specific to the hardware on which you are using the software. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates are not responsible for and expressly disclaim all warranties of any kind with respect to this documentation and will not be responsible for any loss, costs, or damages incurred due to the use of this documentation.

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