It seems like only yesterday we were getting the February updates, and now March is coming. The year seems to be going quickly already. Here are the EPM updates for March 2024. Updates will hit test environments March 1st and prod environments March 15th. Here’s what caught my eye.
Redwood Theme Notification for Service Administrators
I really like this, the home page for admins is going to display a reminder about the upcoming changes to Redwood experience. The changes will be in the April 24.04 update and make three new themes available (Oracle, Custom Dark, and Custom Light) as well as compact navigation. While the update itself is interesting (I saw a preview of the themes and navigation, very cool), what is more interesting to me is the reminder notice. I hope Oracle does this more often with other updates going forward. Here is the screenshot from the update document.
EPM Access Control Support of IDCS Groups
If I understand this correctly, groups created in IDCS will be recognized in access control in the application, meaning that groups of users can be managed in IDCS or in access control. This will allow a centralized place to manage provisioning of predefined roles and manage groups instead of in two places as it is now. If anyone has a better interpretation of this, please comment.
Improved Ancestor Member Access
This functionality will allow users to zoom out to ancestors and see the hierarchy even when they do not have access to the members at the parent level. It is an application setting managed by administrators. Per the documentation example, “Consider the following example, where the Service Administrator selects the Display setting in Default Ancestor Access. Users are able to see the hierarchy tree structure in the grid and in the member selector, but see #NoAccess in cells to which they do not have access”.
Generic Daily Clone Scripts
New scripts to help with automating the cloning of EPM environments, especially useful if you have a disaster recovery standby environment.
Daily Maintenance Start Time – Change of Behavior
The daily maintenance start time can now be set by the hour and minute. I’m not sure of a use case for staggering the start time in general, but this is complimented by another upcoming change. Noted in the Important Actions and Considerations section, the April 24.04 update will include a randomization of the start time by minute. So, when that change happens, if you are not satisfied with the random start time assigned by Oracle, it can be changed to a more desirable minute.
Groovy Access to a User Account’s Email and Full Name
As Arun Raj noted, this is a pretty cool and useful feature. Having access to users email and full name will make sending notifications easier (e.g. rule running long time, rule completed).
Narrative Reporting New Application Roles for Users
Two new application roles will be available in Narrative Reporting.
- Library Administrator – Creates folders, including root-level folders
- Report Administrator – Creates report packages, reports, books, and bursting definitions
Previously, only Service Administrators and Power Users had these capabilities.
As usual, there are lots of other updates in the March release that may be of more interest to you, especially if you work a lot with EDM, there are a lot of updates to EDM coming. I encourage you to read the full document and be prepared when environments are updated.
As always, happy EPM’ng!
Random EPM Notes 