The introduction of the new enterprise mobile app is one of the MAJOR new features in Release 12 and deserves a proper introduction.
Until release 12, Sales Cloud came with multiple mobile apps of different types:
- a multi-purpose app called Oracle Sales Cloud Mobile that allowed users to manage their daily activities: manage activities, consult account information, update opportunities, submit forecasts, …
- a set of single purpose apps that were optimized to perform very specific tasks very efficiently:
- Call Reports to quickly complete and process meeting results
- Mobile Commissions to stay up to date on compensation results
- Deal Management for channel managers to process incoming deal registrations
- Oracle BI Mobile HD to access any report or dashboard
- Oracle Social Network to stay up to date of what is happening on the Sales Cloud Social Network
- Oracle Voice to talk to Sales Cloud mobile where possible in order to verify or update data
The new Enterprise Mobile app regroups where it makes sense some of these apps, makes them all extensible (through a brand new mobile app composer) and all available on Android and iOS.
Enterprise Mobile App
Using the new enterprise mobile app, Sales Cloud users can keep on doing their daily business form managing their calendar, contacts and opportunities but when managing your calendar, you can handle your call reports directly in the enterprise mobile app also. No need to use a separate app for this anymore !
Notice how some fancy visualizations allow for easy opportunity stage updates, win probability updates or to get in touch with your contacts e.g. changing the sales stage is done by clicking on the new new sales stage in the corresponding swimlane chevron below.
Deal managers no longer have to use a separate app for deal management as this now can be made available to them based on their role.
Notice below how intuitive manipulations like swiping a record on a list screen allow to take actions upon the selected information without having to drill into the record first.
Service request information (Service functionality was added to Sales Cloud in release 12 under the banner of Engagement Cloud) has been made available on the enterprise mobile app also!
Oracle Voice has been integrated to the enterprise mobile app also
Mobile App Composer
Configuring the new enterprise mobile app is done through a brand new mobile app composer.
Designing the datamodel for Sales Cloud (adding custom objects or fields) is not mobile specific and therefor is still done through the app composer in Sales Cloud, just like the configuration of security, validation rules and triggers that apply to the datamodel.
The new mobile app composer focuses mainly on how data needs to be displayed on a mobile device.
Let me show you an example of how to use the new mobile app composer in order to add a new field or a report to the new enterprise mobile app.
Once your datamodel changes have been made in app composer, use the ‘Mobile Application Setup’ task to access the new mobile app composer.
If you work on a smaller screen, I would advise to fold away the left pane in order to see the full mobile app composer as I have done to make the screenshots below.
Through drag and drop, new objects can easily be added to the enterprise mobile app.
For each object different types of layouts (list layout, detail layout or edit layout) or configs can be performed (define a picker, saved searched or add reports). Just click on any of the objects to see what is available already in more detail.
In order to design a layout, I prefer working in list mode (red arrow).
Use the ‘duplicate’ icon to duplicate any of the standard layouts, as the standard layouts cannot be extended.
Layouts can be made:
- role specific by assigning roles
- region specific by assigning regions that match the user profile country
- through advanced criteria
Once the layout has been created, you can remove fields or add new fields through drag & drop to the layout.
Once you drop a field on a layout, you will be prompted to choose how you want to display a field. For number fields you could choose to display them as a regular number or as a percentage, but some fancy visuals are sometimes available too like the ‘swimlane’ I used below.
An idea of what the result will look like is immediately available.
Using a similar mechanism, administrators can make any of the standard or custom reports in Oracle Sales Cloud available on a mobile device.
Reusing large reports will result in them being very zoomed out in order for them to fit on a mobile device, especially since the standard reports were designed to be used using a browser on a large screen. They typically have a ‘landscape’ design which does not fit very well when being used on a mobile device. I would always advise to create new reports, with a more ‘portrait’ oriented design, optimized for a mobile device.
There is actually no need to worry on how to deploy these changes you make to the enterprise mobile app. The same mechanism is applied as with previous apps or even the productivity tools like the Outlook integration plugin. Upon every new connection a user makes using the mobile app to Sales Cloud:
- The mobile app will verify whether a new configuration package was created since the previous connection
- If so, the new configuration package is automatically downloaded and installed
- After the installation, the data is being downloaded and displayed in the newly installed layouts
Once the mobile app is installed on a device, a user basically never has perform any actions to keep his mobile app up to date.
