Analytics Housekeeping

When I get access to a Sales Cloud or an Engagement Cloud environment for the first time, I am always eager to start making all kinds of reports to add value to implemented business processes. This is easy to do by taking benefit of all the reporting capabilities that come with Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud.  But before I do that, I do some analytics housekeeping, I always clean up my BI environment first.

It is easy to do and makes it a lot easier for anyone working or making reports to navigate around in the analytics tools.

There are 4 tasks I typically carry out when getting access to a new instance:

1. Clean up the Subject Area list
2. Set standard reports to read-only
3. Clean up catalog folders
4. Cleaning up how to search reports

Clean up the subject area list

Subject areas are the sets of data that you can report upon as I explain in this YouTube video.  But the list of subject areas is quite long. That is actually really exciting, as it allows us to make many reports, in many different ways.  But what if you would not want to use  lead management in Sales Cloud, Households, or Asset Management?  Why would you keep the related subject areas available?  In a few clicks, these can be hidden from anyone making reports.

1. Connect to the Oracle Sales Cloud BI
2. Navigate to the administration section.  If you do not have access to this section, your user does not have the appropriate privileges.  Ask an administrator to grant you the BI Administrator role.

3. Access user and group privileges

4. Remove roles. For each of the subject areas that you want to hide, click on the role names that have access to the subject area and remove the role from the subject area. Remove all roles form having access to the subject area list and it should be hidden from anyone trying to use it.

Set out-of-the-box reports to read-only

Oracle Sales Cloud and Engagement Cloud come with a whole set of out-of-the-box reports.  I like to use them as examples, as templates.  I do not like changing them though, as changing them means that you can no longer look back at how Oracle provided them.  You can always take a copy of them and use the copy instead to make it fit your requirements.  Therefore I always make sure that I set the folder that contains the out-of-the-box subject areas to read only.

1. Connect to the Oracle Sales Cloud BI
2. Navigate to the BI Catalog

3. Choose folder properties

4. Set the folder (including the content) to read only

Exactly the same result can be achieved by changing the permissions as shown below, but changing the read-only property is easier and faster

Clean up catalog folders

Reports are typically made for a specific audience, whether it is by role (for salesreps or sales managers), by country or by business unit.  It is very easy to make sure that users only get to see the reports that they are supposed to be using.

Also when report creation is a distributed task and not only organized centrally, it is very easy to make sure that local report creators in a country far away cannot change reports created where you are located.

It is all about creating roles for each of the user groups in Sales Cloud and creating a folder in the BI catalog where reports for that group of users can be stored.  A last thing to do is hiding those folders that users are not supposed to see by setting the folder permissions.

1. Connect to the Oracle Sales Cloud BI
2. Navigate to the BI Catalog
3. Choose folder permissions

4. Change permissions per role.  These permissions can be set per folder or per individual report if you like micro management
   

There are different levels of permissions to be set, here are the most useful in my opinion:

• Full Control: users can use, create, change and delete the folder and its content
• Delete: users can delete the folder or report
• Traverse: users can access the folder, but not the reports in a folder.  This is a useful permission if you want to grant users access to reports in a sub-folder of this folder
• Read: users can use access a folder or a report, but cannot make changes
• No Access: Users are not allowed to do anything with the folder or report.  The equivalent would be simply not set permissions at all.

Cleaning up how to search reports

There is a last analytics housekeeping task I perform that I discussed in a previous blog post.  There is a way to control, from the reports a user has access to, which are the ones can be searched for by setting reports and dashboards to hidden or not.