Contents

Overview of Common Features................................................................................................2

Overview of Common Features
In this topic, I'm going to give you an overview of the course and explain what we'll be covering. So this
course is a prerequisite to all of the Oracle ERP cloud courses, and it's mandatory because you can find
answers to questions. You're going to learn how to navigate.

Now, one of the key things is how you move around the application, so you need to understand how to
navigate and also the common features like Functional Setup Manager and security, because those are key
to all of the other cloud courses.

What are we going to cover in this particular course? We have our overview of common features. As I
mentioned, navigating. We're going to learn how to navigate in the cloud applications. We'll take a look at
Functional Setup Manager, which is the central location for setting up your cloud applications. It's where
you go to configure those applications.

We need to understand how the security works within cloud, so we'll give you a security overview, and
we'll also take a look at the Vision Corporation, which is the fictional company within our training
environments. And then we'll have a look at an overview of geography. How you set up your geography?
Why do you need your geography to be set up in order to use these cloud applications?

So let's first of all meet Kristen, who is an implementation consultant. Now, she is skilled in SaaS
applications but is going to need your resistance while working with a customer that's recently purchased
Oracle products because she's new to Oracle Fusion Cloud. So she's going to need our help in getting her
customer, Vision, up and running on their recent purchase of Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials.

Now, I mentioned Vision, and I've already said about Vision Corporation. You will learn a little bit more
about the structure of Vision Corporation later on.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications

Carrying on with our overview of common features, we are going to be covering four topics here. Firstly, an
overview of the Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, and then how we can use the Help Center, the Oracle
Help Center, to find additional information. We'll take a look at Oracle Guided Learning for in-application
training, and we'll also talk about Visual Builder, which can be used to configure and extend some of the
cloud applications. I'll also give you a brief look at what other tools you can use.

Starting off then with the Oracle Fusion Cloud applications. What are these cloud applications then? Well,
they are an integrated suite of business applications that connects and automates the entire flow of
business processes across both front and back office operations, and they address the needs of a global
enterprise.

They are engineered to work together, enabling users to streamline the setup process by sharing common
setup data across applications. They're designed to ensure that your enterprise can be modeled to meet
legal and management objectives. The decisions about your implementation of the Oracle cloud
applications are affected by your industry, your business unit requirement for autonomy, business and
accounting policies, the business functions that you're going to want to have performed by business units,
and, optionally, centralized in a shared service center, and also the location of your facilities.

The Oracle cloud application strategy sets the new standard for innovation with its complete standard-
based platform and service-oriented architecture, and is built on two main pillars. Complete solutions
based on a complete and integrated product strategy, and complete choice offers customers the option of
plugging into other Oracle and non-Oracle solutions on the cloud. The Oracle application strategy adapts
quickly to changing business needs while lowering integration costs and other short and long term costs.

The Oracle financial strategy provides a complete and integrated financial management solution that sets
the foundation for good governance and consistent growth. It provides tools that help organizations make
better decisions, increase efficiency, reduce costs, and continue innovation, and it provides a
comprehensive solution that supports reporting with the right information at the right time.
Looking a bit more at our product families, the cloud applications provide a complete modular suite of
applications. You have a choice of functionality, whether it's an individual module, a product family, or the
complete suite on the Oracle Cloud. They provide a broad scope, with few exceptions in terms of global
coverage. There's strong support for North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.

They provide a way to work that matches what end users do through role-based dashboards, embedded
business intelligence, and collaboration tools that dramatically increase productivity and improve decision
making. They provide flexible implementation of applications in a modular fashion, using delivery strategies
that meet the customer's enterprise information technology strategy on the Oracle Cloud.

So as you can see, our complete cloud suite of SaaS applications brings consistent processes and a single
source of truth across the most important business functions, from enterprise resource, planning, supply
chain management, human capital management, to advertising and customer experience. The applications
Help you improve your customer engagement, increase your business's agility, and react to change faster
than ever before.
Looking at a bit more detail into Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud or ERP Cloud, which helps you gain
resilience, agility, and position yourself for growth. It gives you the power to adapt business models and
processes quickly so that you can reduce costs, sharpen forecasts, and innovate more. It's highly scalable
and runs on our Gen 2 cloud infrastructure, giving you unmatched speed, security, and continuity for
organizations of any size. And you can see here the different cloud applications, the platform, and the
infrastructure, and that brings us to the end of this topic.
Oracle Help Center

In this topic, we're going to take a look at the Oracle Help Center, and the Oracle Help Center is a central
hub for all documentation and tutorials and is organized by major product categories, including cloud
applications, middleware, and database, and probably the easiest thing to do is to go in and have a little
look. So let me take you into the system.

So here you can see the Help Center at docs.oracle.com. It's actually https://docs.oracle.com. That's how
you get there. And as you can see, you could do a search for information, but you've got infrastructure,
cloud applications. So we've got our fusion application suite, NetSuite, industry-specific, advertising, on-
premises, et cetera. Everything you need.

Now, I'm maybe interested in financials, so if I click the Financials link, this takes us into another area where
we can get started with our Oracle Financials, in this case 23C. So you can see what's new in an update, you
can understand your solution, et cetera. And we've also got areas that you can navigate to. These are the
top tasks that you can navigate to.

But first of all, what I'm going to show you is this All Books link, because if we come into here, this gives you
all of the books that you can access for Oracle Financials 23C, and you can download them, HTML, or you
can view them in PDFs, so you can download them.

So you have Getting Started. It's divided up into sections. So you've got Getting Started. You've got using
guides. So using assets, using common features, using expenses. But then if we scroll down further, you've
got the implementation guides. So if you want to know more about implementing enterprise structures and
general ledger, for example, you have your PDF there.

And as we keep going on, we've got administration guides, configure an extension for extending the
applications, security. And I'll probably be bringing you back in here when we start looking at security. And
then development, where you can see the tables and views for financials and common features and learn
about these SOAP Web Services and the REST APIs and how we can integrate with Oracle Transactional
Business Intelligence.

So if I was going to be maybe looking at enterprise structures, maybe I want to understand a bit more
about enterprise structures. So you could download it. You can view it in here. But this has got an overview
of it.

This is a really useful book, actually, because it has got all about legal entities, management reporting
structures. You'll find some of this also in the Enterprise Structures and GL guide, but another interesting
lesson in here is this reference data, a way of sharing our setup data across our application. So that's just
one of the documents that you could look at.

Let me take you back up to the top. What do we also have? We have videos. And this is the various videos
that have been loaded into the Help Center, so Using Accounting Hub, Using Budgetary Control, Using
General Ledger, Other Cloud Products, Payables Invoice to Pay. So you might find some useful videos in
there to take a look at.

There is also, if we come back up here, I mentioned the search. So maybe I want to learn a bit about
flexfields. So if I just search for flexfield, this is searching across Financials, and here we've got
Implementing Common Features for Financials and Project Management, and that gives you an overview of
flexfields.

So maybe you've heard this terminology. You're not really sure what a flexfield is and you want to find out a
bit more information about it. You don't know which book to start with. Well, this will tell you which books
to start with. And you'll probably find them in-- we've got applications, common, extending, configure and
extending. That talks about flexfields as well. So you can search if you wish to as well. So a really useful
page.

And here you've got your menu. You can get back to the Fusion Application Suite. And that was Financials,
but, of course, you've got the same available for Accounting Hub, Procurement, Project Management. So if
you want to a little bit more about procurement, you've got the same. The All Books, you've got the various
videos, the APIs and schemas. So how do you create a requisition? There's a video.

So everything that you could want in this one place, docs.oracle.com. So it's where you can come for extra
information. Let me take you back to the slides.

So we've just been into the Help Center. These are the various pages that you can get to, which I showed
you. The search, or this one's talking about searching for journal entries, and then just to mention that the
Help Center has adopted the Fusion Applications Taxonomy. So this is the source of truth for classifying
each pillar, family, and product in the portfolio.
Oracle-branded pillar family and product names should promote Oracle's differentiation in delivering one
cloud for all its customers' lines of business. By naming and organizing the products this way, Oracle's
customers can understand the scope of Oracle's product line and effectively find the information they need.
A well-crafted taxonomy ensures an efficient experience for the Oracle ecosystem.

So for example, we have Oracle Applications Cloud Using Functional Setup Manager. That's been renamed
to Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Using Functional Setup Manager. Oracle Field Service Administering
Oracle Field Service is renamed to Oracle Fusion Cloud Field Service Administering Field Service.

And you can see in the slide there the different levels, the first usage, and the subsequent usage. So when
you're talking about the application suite, when you're first talking about it, it's Oracle Fusion Cloud
Application Suite, and then after that becomes Fusion Application Suite. For the pillar, Oracle Fusion Cloud
ERP, and then Oracle Cloud ERP, et cetera. So for a module, you would start off with Oracle Receivables, for
example, but then you would just talk about Receivables.

So that's our Help Center, where you can find a wealth of information in addition to all of the courses that
you can find in our Cloud Learning Subscription, and these are the names of the product family and the
products that you're going to hear. And that brings us to the end of this topic.
Oracle Guided Learning
What is Oracle Guided Learning? Well, it's a service that will provide step-by-step guides for the Oracle
Cloud applications.

And it's included with every Fusion Cloud application. So you can use this in application guidance to
support your implementation, your end user adoption and training, and use of the Fusion Cloud
applications. Let me just show you this web page because you need to request an Oracle Guided Learning
account. So you have to fill out a form for your application.

So you're going to get up to 15 in application assets, which includes messages, smart tips, process guides.
So, for example, your process guides-- that's going to visually walk users through a process, providing step-
by-step guidance to help them through a task. So, for example, you could guide your users through the
process of putting an expense claim on and make sure that all the correct fields are filled out while they're
completing that process.

A smart tip-- that's going to provide context-sensitive help hover text, or supplemental information to form
fields, buttons, labels, and other elements of your user interface, for example. And then you've got
messages. So these could be announcing new features and functions. Or they could be welcoming new
users, maybe informing them about up and coming events, that kind of thing.

So you've also got, as it says there, free online training, webinars, resources to learn how to use Oracle
Guided Learning-- how you could edit those delivered assets, create, and manage those assets. And you've
got access to analytics to measure the change in training effectiveness.

So let me take you into the system. And I'll show you an example. I'm in as Brody Smith. I've got an
information here, an announcement-- so maintenance upgrades. This is my Guided Learning widget.

So I've got a process here, welcome; another process for setting, vacation, and delegation rules, some
communications and courses and policy links. And I can actually search to see if there are any guides
available for me. Yes, I can create a journal batch.

So it's General Accounting then Journals. So it's just going to step me through the tasks I need to do. So
select Tasks, Create Journal. And then enter your batch information. You can learn more about batches
there. So let's say this is 0723 Adjustment. Oops.

And then you click Next. And enter the journal details, which is this area here. But notice, we've also got
some hover over tips here. So this is my journal naming convention, which is your initials plus today's date
plus today's sequential count of journals.

So let's put in my initials, today's date. And we'll just put a 1 in there. And the description-- they must be
supported by a complete description. If the description cannot standalone, you've got to attach some
documentation.

We'll just say Bob asked me to do an adjustment. I've got to have a category. And that just gives you an
example. Well, this is an adjustment.

So then we'll click Next. And it tells us to enter the journal line details. And then select Save. So I will enter
my journal line details, say OK. We'll just put a couple of lines on.
So I'm just moving it from one account to another. And now it's telling me to hit Save and then Batch
Actions, Request Approval. And that has submitted it.

So that is just walking you through the steps that you need to do to put a journal on. It could be an expense
report as I say or an AP invoice. And also, you saw there it gave some specifics for the journal naming
convention, for example-- the fact that we had to put a description in. So very, very useful to have that
within the application. So that is one part of Guided Learning.

Visual Builder
Visual Builder or Visual Builder Studio. And Visual Builder is used by some of the product families and
applications to customize the Oracle Cloud application. So Visual Builder Studio gives you the power to
customize the Oracle Cloud applications to suit your company's specific business needs. You'll have tools
like Visual Builder Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension toolkit at your disposal, giving you an
unprecedented level of power and control over your Oracle Cloud apps ecosystem.

And as I say, it's certain product families and products. So in Financials, for example, you can use Visual
Builder Studio to extend joint venture management. But there are a few common cases that you can easily
achieve with Visual Builder Studio, where it can be used. So for example, in the digital sales application, you
want the employees view of a given page to be exactly the same as it came from Oracle. But you want
managers to see a field that doesn't even exist in Oracle's original app, so one that computes the sales rep's
commission based on the sales amount for each completed deal. You simply create a layout that includes a
custom field to calculate the commission amount for the manager's view, then create a rule that displays
that layout only when the user is a manager.

Suppose you need to add new content to a page in an Oracle Cloud application. If there's a dynamic
container on that page that's marked as extensible, you can use that container to display things like text
fields, images, or even a button that starts a chain of events known as an action chain. You can even include
data from custom objects you created in Application Composer in your app UI and make certain fields
customizable by your users.

If you need your own set of pages, create an app UI which will look and feel exactly like all the other Oracle
Cloud applications in your instance. You can link to this app UI from an existing Oracle application to make it
appear as though your custom pages are part of the app itself or make the app UI accessible as a separate
module from Oracle's new Ask Oracle menu.

On another page in the digital sales app, you want an error to appear if a user enters a number less than
100 or greater than 10,000 in the discount field. Even though the original field contains no such value
checking, just set a simple field validator on the discount field, and any number outside that range will be
instantly flagged. So those are a few things that you can potentially do with Visual Builder Studio. But there
are other tools that you can use to configure and extend certain of the applications. And I'm just going to
take you and show you a diagram of those.
So here, we're seeing some more examples of tools for configuration and extensions. And you can see,
Visual Builder Studio is listed here, but there are also other tools. And as I said about Visual Builder Studio
only being available for certain specific product families and applications within those families, the same is
true of Application Composer. And in Financials, for example, we don't use Application Composer. But I
think in Projects, they do.

So if you want to modify the user interface, then you could use, if applicable, Page Composer, Application
Composer, or Visual Builder Studio. Updating the branding, that would be the appearance work area from
your navigator menu. And then for the home page, configuring the home page, maybe changing what's
displayed on your home page, for example, putting in a new theme for your home page, that would be the
appearance work area as well.

Adding attributes to business objects, potentially Application Composer, but we also have these things
called flexfields, which are flexible data input areas. And some of them you have to set up. And some
flexfields are optional, something called a descriptive flexfield or an extensible flexfield, these are optional.
But you can use those to track additional information that Oracle wouldn't necessarily know you want to
keep, and it's not available on the page that you're in. So you could enable a descriptive flexfield, for
example, if it's there, to track that additional information.

Modifying reports and analytics, we have our Business Intelligence toolkit really for that. So you've got
Analytics Publisher. We've got Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence. And we have something called
Smart View, which is an Excel-based analysis tool. You can also configure the help content. So for example,
if you get a little question mark, which you can click on, which will bring up some help, where you can
configure that help to suit your own business needs, maybe put in your own business processes in there,
for example.

And then we have Guided Learning which we've already talked about, where you can create interactive
guides to guide your users through a particular process. So there are a number of tools that you can use to
help you configure and extend the applications, if you need to. But as I say, just be aware that some of
them are only for certain product families. Let me take you back to the slide. So there we are, that was
Visual Builder Studio plus just a little flavor of some of the other tools that you could potentially use.