This document provides information about Oracle Communications Launch Cloud Service Release 25A.
This document consists of the following sections:
New Features
This release includes the following features and enhancements:
- Integrate Launch with Oracle Digital Business Experience Process Increment 2
- Support for Digital Business Experience and Non-Digital Business Experience Deployment Model
- Support for Multiple Business Units
- Pricing Model Enhancements
- Improved Publish Job Tracking Capabilities
- Enhancements to Product Offering Entity Extensibility
- After Market Extensibility of Product Synchronization Mapping
- Introduction of New Product Specialist Role
Integrate Launch with Oracle Digital Business Experience Process Increment 2
- Introduction of an attribute Composition type to Product Offering entity which takes two values partial item and whole item and can be published to Siebel CRM.
- Introduction of new product offering type in an atomic offering called Time Based Offer to support time-based discounts. The product specification associated to such offerings should have the characteristics Duration, DurationUnitOfMeasure, and DurationValidityStart. This Product Offer gets published to Siebel CRM as a Customizable Product.
- Introduction of a property called Apply to which takes user balance/sharer balance values on adjustments in an atomic offering (all types) for achieving sharing of discounts and allowances. This configuration gets published to Oracle Billing and Revenue Management application.
- At least one charge per offer
- Support for multiple charges
- Support for multi pricelist
- Multiple Recurring Fee type offers with unique frequency
- Bundle and its components to have the same Billing service type
The business benefit of this feature is to improve the publish automation to runtime systems, namely Siebel CRM and Oracle Billing and Revenue Management.
- Communications Catalog Product Manager
- Communications Catalog Administrator
Support for Digital Business Experience and Non-Digital Business Experience Deployment Model
- Launch integrated into Digital Business Experience (DBE) stack
- Launch integrated into non-Digital Business Experience stack
There are certain features applicable to DBE deployments that will have the solution level validations and mandatory properties for catalog definitions. However these properties may not be relevant for non-DBE deployments. With the introduction of a feature flag, we can now absolve non-DBE deployments from using DBE features or restrictions. By default, the Launch application will support DBE stack deployment. For non-DBE stack deployment, we can set this feature flag using a REST endpoint to disable DBE features as a part of setup of Launch application. Once you have set this switch, you can't toggle them.
For example, there are certain DBE specific fields like billing type, billing service type, service instance, composition type, fulfillment item code, Time based offer etc. on product offering which are required for the DBE solution. When the switch is off, these DBE specific fields and validations will not be available.
Raise a Service Request to Support for disabling the DBE capabilities. This is a one-time initial setup.
The business benefit of this feature is the ability to use Launch for both DBE and non-DBE customers with much ease.
Access Requirement: Communications Catalog Administrator
Support for Multiple Business Units
A Communications Service Provider (CSP) organization can have many Business Units (BU) based on the regional and/or line of business that they operate upon. Having such segregations allow the CSPs to manage and operate their business needs separated by their BUs Units. Each BU can have its own set of catalog definitions for products and services and/or can share the common ones based on how their BU's need to operate.
Launch now supports multiple BUs to share or have exclusivity for product offerings and price lists. You can now restrict the usage of product offers and price lists to a particular BU for their specific market offerings, or open it up for usage across all, or share amongst a few BUs. During product offering creation, the users BU would be set by default. Additionally, you could add more BUs to promote data sharing. During bundle product offering creation, the components would belong to the user BU only, and will not contain components from different BUs. The same is applicable to Pricelist entity. Business unit striping does not apply for other entities such as product offering price, specifications, attributes, catalog, categories, rules, terms, initiatives, and so on. These entities are common across all BUs.
- Existing users who do not have a BU association can view all offers and price lists
- New users requiring restriction to a specific BU must have the BU added to their user profile.
- Should you need to have a Default BU that can be added too using profile options
- Maintain Organization to BU as 1:1
- Users can remove the BU association to make it available for all BUs
For example, a CSP has 2 BUs (BU1 and BU2). Offers and price lists can now be created for BU1 to be exclusive to BU1. Offers and price lists created as part of BU2 can be made exclusive to BU2.
The business benefit is the ability for multiple business units to have sharing and exclusivity options during modeling market offers.
Configuration:
1. Create Organization > 2. Create Business Unit > 3. Create Resource Organization > 4. Create Resource User > 5. Associate BU and User to Organization > 6. Link Resource User to Security User (if security user is already created)
For setup details on business units, see Launch Cloud Service Implementation Guide.
- Communications Catalog Product Manager
- Communications Catalog Administrator
Pricing Model Enhancements
- Allowance consumption model - You should now be able to model the allowance
based consumption discount for simple product offering through adjustments as it
has been introduced as a new model type.
- Allowance consumption discount help you consume the allowances first, and once exhausted, lets you charge customers a fee for it. In earlier releases, only when you configure allowances in the product offering price and enable auto creation model of balance consumption model, it was being created.
- The consumption model would have a usage fee configured where you charge for the usage and then have a discount configured which checks if there is an allowance balance in the subscriber account then use that and credit back the monetary part. If there is no allowance balance, then the customer is debited or charged a fee.
- For example, monthly recurring subscription fee grants 100 off network minutes allowance valid for 1 month and 50 on network minutes valid for one month through Wireless product offering. Usage fee is configured to use attribute based pricing using value map zoning. Wireless product offering of type discount is used to consume the allowances granted through the Wireless product offering.
- Additional recurring fee types - You should now be able to add recurring fees of type cycle arrear and cycle forward arrear in addition to the existing cycle fees.
- Additional one time fee types - When configuring one time fees, you would now be able to qualify the fee type as purchase, cancel, or any other custom defined type. For custom defined type, modify the lookup ORA_ATC_ONE_TIME_FEE_TYPE.
- Attribute based adjustments - Ability to configure attribute-based adjustments on bundle offering using product specification characteristics. For example, Supremo Lite gets a price adjustment of 10% at the bundle level using attribute-based adjustment with product specification characteristic Speed.
The business benefit of this is the additional product offering price modeling constructs that can be published to runtime applications resulting in faster time to market.
- Communications Catalog Product Manager
- Communications Catalog Administrator
Improved Publish Job Tracking Capabilities
You can now track the Publish job details beyond the current level of details of the execution status and its error description. With the introduction of Tracking Id for every spoke application that you publish to, now you can get the exact count of records that are being published, or had the failure along with the type of entities that have been published. Additionally, the log file will provide granular details for each entity, including record counts, successfully published records to the spoke application, and error details for any failed records. This allows shorter time to identify the failure, and with the low-level error details, you can address those issues quickly to re-publish the Initiative.
The business benefit of this feature is the improved Operational Efficiency and Accelerated Time to Market for our customers.
Access Requirement: Communications Catalog Administrator
Enhancements to Product Offering Entity Extensibility
All extensions will be treated as first class properties to product offering resource starting this release. Earlier, they were created as a sub resource for the additional properties. The earlier user experience of offer extensibility stays intact where the user specifies the list of fields to be extended via the Launch user interface. The user can upload the spreadsheet containing the list of fields to be extended. The fields should be simple attributes of type Text, Number, and Checkbox.
For example, the Communications Service Provider wants to extend the product offering entity say SupremoProductOffering with additional field partnerBrand and twenty other fields. These are now being created as first class property of Product Offering resource.
The business benefit of this is the ability to extend the first-class properties on the product offering entity that can be easily made available for reporting purposes and also simplifies the maintenance of API schema.
Access Requirement: Communications Catalog Administrator
After Market Extensibility of Product Synchronization Mapping
You can now add custom mapping transformations to the existing productized integrations that we have with Siebel CRM and Oracle Billing and Revenue Management applications. Any new fields that require business specific transformation logic can be added as extensions to the released mapping files using the "Third party function service swagger" to bring your own mapping services.
CXIF acts as the API management and routing layer in addition to providing the integration microservices to upload the extended mapping file to be used in the catalog distribution process.
This feature provides the ability for customers to add not just additional attributes to integration entities, but also add custom transformation mappings that are beyond what the productized integrations provide to improve operational efficiency and mitigate any enrichment.
- Wiring the external system.
- Understand the Third-Party Function Service Swagger
- Create TIC for third party API
- Provide Authentication method, credentials, and host information
- Mapping file changes.
- Introduce the mapping extension changes
- Upload to UCM folder
- Validate the integration.
- Ensure the mapping code is hosted per TIC entry
- Validate the connection
- Test the publish flow to include the external mapping logic
For more detailed setup steps, see Launch Cloud Service Integration Guide.
Access Requirement: Communications Catalog Administrator
Introduction of New Product Specialist Role
A new role titled Product Specialist has been introduced to mirror the capabilities of Technical Specialist role to align with the Digital Business Experience solution. Existing Technical Specialist role will continue to exist as is, but recommendation will be to use Product Specialist to manage the Work Bench features.
The business benefit is for alignment with the Digital Business Experience solution role involving technical catalog modeling.
Access Requirement: Communications Product Specialist
Known Issues
This section describes the known issues in this release.
Components page doesn't allow scrolling of offers in Available Offers section
While assembling the components for a bundle offer in the Components page, the Available Offers section displays the list of offers based on the search criteria. However, if the result set is large, the page doesn't allow scrolling to view those offers.
Workaround: Narrow down the search to return fewer offers.
Audit list shows the fields that were earlier removed
After you remove some fields from your product offering audit list and save, the removed fields still show up in the UI as part of the audit list. However, these fields aren't auditable anymore and no changes will occur to these fields in the backend.
You can ignore this issue. There is no loss in functionality.
Browser refresh of non-English page renders page in English language
While using the application with Portuguese language pack, using the browser refresh renders the page in English language.
Currently, there is no workaround.
Documentation Accessibility
For information about Oracle's commitment to accessibility, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program website at http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=docacc.
Access to Oracle Support
Oracle customer access to and use of Oracle support services will be pursuant to the terms and conditions specified in their Oracle order for the applicable services.
Oracle Communications Launch Cloud Service Release Notes, Release 25A
G13596-01