Working in the Oracle HCM Cloud Center of Excellence, I see quite a few opportunities for wins that come up repeatedly. You know what kind of win I mean: something that's easy to do and scores big points with your customer/boss/fellow users.
The one I see with almost every HCM Cloud implementation is actually pretty simple to deliver: an organization wants to extend the user interface appearance and structure. You'll hear requirements like the following:
- Appearance: We want the UI to reflect our brand and identity (which typically means show our logo and use our color scheme).
- Structure: We want the home page (aka springboard) to show actions and information in a structure relevant to the way we work. The structure out of the box doesn't fit us.
- Text: We have our own terminology and we want that terminology in the UI.
So you'll hear about one or more of these types of requirements. And they're important to that organization - sometimes they're deal breakers. And the solutions are easy to deliver. Most can be delivered and ready for review in 15 to 30 minutes. Let's take each of these use cases individual and walk through how it works.
Appearance
And yes, as a matter of fact, you can see the colors before you make your choices.
Easy peasy. Responsive to the device you're using for access...including some nifty enhancements for your phone in R12, like this:
Structure
Editing the UI information and action presentation structure in HCM Cloud is pretty simple. You're presented with a list of information and action choices. Do you want it visible for all roles or a particular role? Do you want it visible on the Welcome Springboard (aka the home page)? In what order to you want the visible items to appear?
By the way, you can also click on the Names to drill down make edits to lower-level pages. You can also create new pages from here. So you are the master of your structure.
Text
In all honesty, Text is so easy that there is no need for a dedicated administration page. That Structure administration page just above? Click on the Name and make your text edits. Done. Or drill down to the appropriate page and make your text edits. Done. Now you've included terminology specific to an organizational culture. That's one change management issue you can cross off the list. No fuss, no muss. Done.
So, with a little bit of effort, you can move the UI from something like this:
... to something with a little more corporate and seasonal context like this:
A Few More Thoughts
First, because I know you're going to ask, the changes we've discussed here survive upgrades for the most part. I've seen a few glitches regarding text changes, but they're easily fixed without much effort.
Second, I know this all appears to be pretty easy stuff. But you'd be amazed how often I find myself helping customers and partners in tailoring their Appearance and/or Structure and/or Text. So it seemed like a good idea to share some of this here. So now you know.
Third, note that all the screen shots of changes I've made are deployed to a sandbox. Best practice, folks...deploy to a sandbox, let the customer/end users review (and rest assured they'll change it a bit), and deploy to production after you obtain approval.
UI extensibility is the easiest win...small effort leading to big value for your users. And this is about as easy as it gets.
As always, your comments are appreciated. Let me know what you're thinking.
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