R12.1.2 – User Interface Enhancements
Further to my previous article (E-Business Suite R12.1.2 now available) I would like to show you some of the improvements that have been made to the User Interface in R12.1.2. I say “User Interface”, as that is the term which I am used to using, but to be fashionable, the term is now “User Experience”, shortened to “UX”.
General UI Improvements
Favorites
As soon as you log in to R12.1.2 you will spot something new near the top of the screen, a “Favorites” drop-down menu.
If I add a few favourites this is what it looks like when you click on it:
This new drop-down is available on all web-based screens, which will make navigating to your most used screens that bit quicker.
Navigator
Once you have opened a web screen, another drop-down appears to the left of the Favorites drop-down.
The Navigator shows you all the Responsibilities and related Menus as a drop-down menu. Here you can see I am in the Employee Self Service Personal Actions screen, and I am using the Navigator to select the Reporting Pack List screen from the Projects SU Repsonsibility:
This UI/UX enhancement is very powerful and should mean that you will never need to see the main menu after you’ve logged in. However, if you have a lot of Responsibilites (like the OPERATIONS user in a Vision environment) the drop-down does become a little cumbersome:
Hover Pop-up Windows
An exciting new feature, called hover pop-up windows, allow users to obtain additional information simply by hovering their cursor over selected fields on the Project List, Edit Budget and Edit Forecast pages. A small window will pop up on the screen providing additional information that was previously only available via drill downs. I will show some screenshots of this new feature under the Project List section.
Projects UI Improvements
Project List
The Project List screen has been improved in a number of ways. The Project List region now has an “Actions” button against each record. Clicking this button takes the user to a new screen, which will save the User having to navigate into the Project Home Page before they can perform a Action against the selected Project.
The Project List screen has been enhanced with several Hover Pop-ups wich provide a lot on information to the User, without needing to drill down into detail screens:
Summary
This article has hopefully given you a taste of some of the new features of Release 12.1.2. It is good to see that Oracle are captialising on their investment in UX, not just in Fusion Applications, but ensuring that the legacy (or “Applications Unlimited”) users benefit as well.
In the next couple of weeks, my colleagues will cover some of the new Projects functionality, such as the new Report Views and Bookmarks regions on the Project List page and functionality improvements in Performance Reporting and Change Management.
Great Article. I would also add that in 12.1.2 the following UI enhancements have been made which i think are worth mentioning:
Project “Workbench”
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From what I could gather, the new Project List now has an additional two sections: Worklist (workflow objects) and Report Views.
Report Views put seem to be another name for Alternate Project Search and on my environment I could not get this to work and from what I hear, the Alternate Project Search works ad-hoc on many instances.
My concern would be just how well the page performs given some have previously complained of a performance issue on the Project List page. This will just add to that I fear!
Record History (Equivalent to /Row Who in Forms)
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Record History allows users to see data about a particular record, such as who created the record and when, and who most recently updated the record and when. Record history provides better auditing capabilities for OA Framework based pages
and ensures SOX compliance
For those of us used to Forms navigation, itӳ the equivalent of
/ Row Who
Improved Searches
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There is now a Look Ahead LOV that is similar to a yahoo page where entering a letter will initiate the search with values being listed beneath the field. I have yet to see this in action within Projects and I believe upcoming changes within R12.1.3 will allow a user to identify which LOV field has Look Ahead enabled.
Flexfield References Support
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Currently, in Forms-based applications, users can set up Reference fields whose value is used to derive properties of segments in a flexfield. In Release 12.1.1, the same support has been extended to Oracle Application Framework-based applications.
Though technically, this was for !2.1.1 i think it still warrants to be mentioned in your blog since not many people are aware that it is now possible to reference OA FWK page fields to derive flexfield properties. Finally! Oracle has listened to one of the major obstacles of using flexfields within OA FWK pages.
Upcoming Popup window changes
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I’m particularly interested to see the new R12.1.3 Pop-up enhancements that will allow form submits. If executed right within the individual product teams, this should radically enhance the user interface for Project Mgt and finally put to rest navigation and # of clicks a user needs to make to complete a flow. With each popup submit it will also improve performance of pages since refresh rates will be less given the popup windows may only reference a cell or field within a page. I hope the ORacle Projects Development team revisits the PJT interface and enables this pop up submit capability on multiple steps within a complete flow.