Monday 5 March 2018

The Changing Face of Oracle Cloud

The Changing Face of Oracle Cloud

As many of the readers of my blog know, I have been working with Oracle Cloud since "Beta 16" - which was a long time ago now!

Over the years, I've seen the product change and evolve with each new release.   Sometime, these changes have been introducing new functionality but every now and then we've seen a major change to the 'look and feel' of the product.   With Release 13 we are about to see another.

I'm going to be giving a presentation on this very subject at Collaborate 2018 in Las Vegas in April.  But, I thought I'd give a quick preview here.

As with all modern products, the original version often gets referred to as "Classic" once new versions appear.  Oracle Cloud is no different and I'm going to refer to the original look and feel as "The Classic Version".

The Classic Version

Back in the day, the "Fusion" screens were designed as "Workareas" and made up of 4 regions.

Region 1 was the "Global" region which appeared at the top of the screen and typically was used for navigation.   It tended to persist across all screens.

Region 2 was the "Task area" where the tasks available to that specific workarea (based on the user's roles) were displayed.

Region 3 was the "Transactional area" where the bulk of the transaction processing for the chosen task was performed.

Region 4 was an optional region and was known as the "Contextual area".   Here, useful additional information was displayed based on the context of the transaction.

Here's an example of one of these workareas:




The "Simplified User Interface" (SUI)

Next up was the Simplified User Interface, or SUI to its friends.

The idea of the SUI was that it simplified the user interface for "casual" users such as managers or employees.   It existed alongside the classic screens which tended to be used for the more "professional" users who used the system as a tool for their work - e.g. HR Specialists.

The SUI was accessed via a "Springboard" page with icons to facilitate navigation.  The workareas were cut down and simplified to make the transactions simpler to complete.   For workareas with multiple uses, tabs were used to segregate data and to keep each screen "uncluttered".

Here's an example of the SUI.


The "New" Simplified User Interface

And so, now we come to the next new user interface!

But, wait for it...... I'm going to be talking more about this at Collaborate 2018, so I'm not going to give a spoiler here :(    If you want to know more, come along to my Collaborate presentation "The Changing Face of Oracle Cloud".

Hint, think mobile first!