Application customization empowers customers to work on their business process more closely. It is one of the critical factors which helps overall application acceptance and in turn customer satisfaction. One of the major hindrances for Oracle Cloud SaaS adoption or acceptance is a myth about cloud customization. Normally we think there is no customization possible in the Cloud and enterprises today have to use only the functionality provided by Oracle Cloud SaaS applications.
We are calling it a myth because customization of Oracle Cloud SaaS applications can be done. Traditionally, for on-premise applications, we would do customization of (FRICEW) Forms, Reports, Interface, Conversions and Workflows. In the Cloud world, the equivalent word for customization is Extensions.
There are two options to customize (Extensions). The extensions (customizations) which are possible through these inbuilt tools are called run time customizations. Customizations and extensions which include more complex changes, such as creating a SOA composite application or creating a new batch job, creating Oracle ADF artefacts or web services etc. are called design time customizations which are purely technical and need specialized knowledge, and are developed using Oracle JDeveloper or other tools, such as Oracle SOA Composer. These customizations and extensions i.e. design time aren’t available in Oracle Cloud implementations (SaaS) but you can develop and implement it using PaaS (Platform as a Service)
You can use standard Native Oracle cloud SaaS Functionality to do the following extensions. These are pertaining to applications other than Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle Taleo:
- Branding customization – e.g. changing the logo/application name in simplified UI, adding the enterprise logo in the report layout.
- Page customization – e.g. the user can add the attribute, move, delete or show a hidden attribute, hide components on a page, change the layout of a page, and the user can customize the content from a dialog box etc.
- Object customization – e.g. for the end user, access to a new business object page can be added in the Navigator menu.
- Security customization – restricting access to a custom object i.e. adding data security.
- Business Intelligence – e.g. report creation, changing report layout, creation of dashboards etc.
- Help customization – e.g. change text that’s displayed when the user moves the cursor over a button, any link, any icon button, or over any title of a tab.
- Extensible flex fields – functioning of extensible flex fields are identical to descriptive flex fields, with extra features. You can add as many context-sensitive segments to the flex fields as you need. There is no constraint to the number of columns predefined and listed for the flex field.
The good thing about these tools is that these are inbuilt, no separate license is required and they are available in all pillars e.g. HRMS, Procurement, Finance etc.
Application Composer and Business Process Composer are the tools which are available only in Oracle Sales Cloud and have more functionalities than Page Composer. Oracle sales cloud has got the additional customization layer i.e. job level, till which customization can be done. All the other applications (e.g. Finance, Procurement etc) can be customized till the Global, Site and User levels only.
The above list has only a few examples mentioned, but you can get more information about the same in the Oracle Cloud extension guide. Oracle has built a huge reservoir of documents, videos, and whitepapers which will surely help you to understand customization-related concepts and guide you to implement the same. Please refer to the below mentioned links in order to access the related documents.
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