Home and global navigation: Introducing Home with Ask Oracle

You now can enable Home with Ask Oracle, which is a new home and global navigation experience for your Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications environment. You use it to search for tasks, applications, and information. It's also how you navigate when you want to go from one place to another. You can simply ask for what you want or scan a list of intelligent suggestions. Home with Ask Oracle will remember where you've been recently and where you frequently go. 

The new home experience brings together these key things: 

  • Search: Type-ahead and synonym matching help you quickly find things even if you don't know what they're called. Hints appear in the search field before you type. 
  • Product map: It's shown when you first use the new home. The product map is organized to help you learn what's available to you.  
    • The first level shows all the functional groups you have access to. 
    • The second level, which is displayed when you open a functional group, shows the work areas and tasks you can go to. 

      Functional groups in first level of product map

      Functional groups in first level of product map

      Second level of product map under the my team group

      Second level of product map under the my team group

    • Suggestions list: It shows your most used and recently visited work areas and tasks first. After you've used the application for a while, suggestions take over as the default view. If you don't want to wait for suggestions to become your default home view, you can set it as the default from the user menu. 

      Suggestions List

      Suggestions list

      If enabled, Home with Ask Oracle replaces the News feed home page and the global header on all Redwood pages. Some global header features remain on the classic pages.

Home with Ask Oracle provides an optimized global navigation experience. New users can learn what's available in the application and returning users can get to the work quickly. With type-ahead search, you can ask for what you want in your own words. 

Steps to Enable

To enable Home with Ask Oracle for all users:

  1. In Sandboxes, create a sandbox or enter an existing one. Make sure the sandbox has the Appearance tool.
  2. From the sandbox Tools menu, select Appearance.
  3. Create a theme with Home with Ask Oracle as the home page layout. 
  4. Apply the theme.
  5. If prompted, run the scan to resolve any unsupported expressions.
  6. Click Home icon and make sure the home isn't blank. If it's blank, follow these steps:
    1. Open the Scheduled Processes page by navigating to https://<<fa-host>>/fscmUI/faces/FuseOverview?fndGlobalItemNodeId=itemNode_tools_scheduled_processes_fuse_plus. Replace <<fa-host>> with your specific Fusion Applications host URL.
    2. Schedule a new process and select Create Index for Ask Oracle.
    3. Set the Re-create Index parameter as Yes and submit the process.
    4. After the job runs successfully, you can see that the home isn't blank. If the issue persists, contact your help desk.
  7. Publish the sandbox.

For cloud at customer implementations, you should not enable Home with Ask Oracle because the required services aren't available. 

Tips And Considerations

  • Search on business objects isn’t yet supported in Home with Ask Oracle.
  • Run the Synchronize Notifications in Global Header scheduled process regularly so that notifications in Home with Ask Oracle reflect the latest workflow status. Let's say after you approve something from email, you still see the notification asking for approval in Home with Ask Oracle. After the scheduled process runs, that notification will go away. The process does the same sync for notifications in existing places like the global header, so now it also applies to notifications in Home with Ask Oracle.  

Approval notifications in Home with Ask Oracle have some unique characteristics to keep in mind:

  • Only the primary action button (for example, Approve) is shown. Click to navigate to the full notification to take any secondary actions.
  • Notifications are marked as read after being displayed.
  • Watchlist and Favorites aren’t available in the new home experience. They’re available only on pages built with Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF).
  • Oracle Guided Learning isn’t available on home when the Home with Ask Oracle layout is used.