Presentation at UKOUG Ireland 2012 Conference: Oracle Fusion Applications: User Assistance and Support Ecosystem by Ultan O'Broin (@ultan) Director, Applications User Experience and Richard Bingham (@richardbingham),Senior Principal Technical Support.
So then, what do you get when you buy Oracle Fusion Applications? You get a product experience, another ecosystem of technology, user experience, and management tools. We’re not going to explore everything there, just the user assistance and the supportability framework parts of the ecosystem and how they contribute to the product experience. You can see here that the framework is part of an overall management toolkit based on Oracle’s tools such as OAM and OEM, and you can read about that in Richard’s great book, which also contains best practices for implementers and administrators to follow. Hint: there is a discount too!What we have here isHelp Embedded in the Applications to complete the users’ taskContextual Help to address more complex problemsMessages to Help Users Solve their own problemsException and Incident Management that deliver reliable performance and experience for users help desk and support personnel, all part of a reliability toolbox.
Where more detailed help is needed:You can access more information, such as examples, FAQs, and demos that apply directly to the current task by clicking the Help icon that will then present a Help Popup windowIf you don’t see what you need in the Help Popup, you can display a complete set of help for the business activity.If you have the appropriate privileges, you can add help to appear in this Help Popup.
You can add any type of file to the help, to support videos, slides, and spreadsheets, as well as text-based documents. You can point to a web document, use a desktop file, or create a document using a rich text editor within Fusion Applications Help.Ratings and tags for custom help are stored locally because these documents are not visible outside your firewall.As part of your security setup, you decide which user roles or users to assign the privilege that enables customization of the help.All of the content is available together in the user interface. Custom content appears at the top of search results and is distinguished by a small custom logo. As well as adding content, you can hide Oracle help content, or copy and edit it, in which case it is handled as custom content.Custom help is preserved when you apply later help patches. You can choose to reactivate hidden Oracle help content at any time.Users are more likely to use a help system that provides access to all of the information they need: site-specific policies and procedures, as well as generic Fusion help. Increased use of help creates users who are better informed of feature benefits and best practices, leading to reduced support calls and improved user adoption.
We already discussed that customers have requested the ability to add their own help, and more will do it if it’s not an IT project. Let’s walk through a scenario:It’s time for year end employee appraisals, and the help desk has had several calls from managers looking for the link to the company’s Performance Management toolkit, created by the HR department. The help desk administrator role can add documents to the help system. She therefore decides to add the link to the help popup on the Performance Manager Overview page. She opens that page, clicks the help icon, and clicks the Manage Custom Help link.
On the Manage Custom Help page, the help desk administrator clicks the Create icon to add a new help document.
She enters details of the Performance Management Toolkit, including the link to its location and a brief description, then clicks Save and Close.
She verifies that the new help is listed correctly on the Manage Custom Help page and clicks Done.
She reopens the help popup and verifies that the Toolkit is now listed there. [Click] She checks that the link opens the Toolkit.Now that managers can access the Toolkit directly from the page, calls to the help desk should be reduced.
Show of hands: do you know your system administrator? Personally? How to contact them? Do you even have a system administrator?This guy certainly has job security. But, wouldn’t it be better for your organization if his time was spent solving real problems and your users can help themselves more? Or providing the means for users to contact the help desk easily, supplying the information the help desk needs so that they can used Oracle tools or ITIL processes to keep users happy or to even contact Oracle Support?
Conducted a customer survey with over 3000 EBS users as we started designing Design. Three of the top ten issues cited with EBS usability focused on messages.
Consistent way of organizing methods of getting help and assistance from Oracle.3 communities are coming
Federated Search, where you search in each UI and it returns results from both data sources. The “complete” solution.