Oracle Fusion CRM is the next generation CRM tool built from
the ground up over the past 6 years with strong foundation around Cloud, Social
and Mobile. Let’s focus on mobile. Mobile App is available for iPhone and
Blackberry. I believe iPad, Android and Windows mobile are in the works. I
played with iPhone App version and here’s the summary.
The iPhone app functionality is on par with web version. You
have access to Opportunity, Sales Accounts, contacts, leads, tasks as well as
Analytics. There is only connected
mode. So you need cellular or Wi-fi access to work on the application. I don’t
want to go into detail on the standard functionality available out-of-box. All
basic functionality such as creating, editing, viewing records are allowed on the
objects exposed in the mobile app.
Where the App is powerful for enterprise customers is when
it comes to configuring custom fields, business rules and deployment.
Configuration: Key
differentiator here is the development environment used for configuring mobile
application. It is not xcode. The configuration changes are done in the CRM
application composer. That’s right the same tool you use to configure the web
portal. Since application composer is
design@runtime, there are no compiles or configuration pushes. You make the
changes to mobile pages by adding or changing the field layouts. Once the
configuration is saved, you need to log out and log back in to see the changes
in the mobile App.
E.g. I tried to add a new field called RFP due date to the
opportunity object. I added the field in the object and then exposed the field
in the enterprise pages as well as mobile pages. Each object by default has
list and detail view. You determine where the field needs to appear in the
screen. A wizard helps you add the field to the desired view. The changes were
immediate and I was able to input the data and from mobile App and see it on
the web portal.
The next change I did was to add a server script field
validation. It is a simple field validation to check if the RFP due date is
greater than close date. Then pop up a message to stop the user to change the
input date. Because it is a server script and I’m doing a field validation you
do not need to do this separately for mobile version. It automatically checks
that validation when the record is saved in the App. Check out the screen shots
for the same message appearing in both UI.
Usability: The
mobile version is definitely driven for quick access to information on the
account, contacts, and opportunities. I particularly liked the action bar that
pulls out when you are inside an account to then have options to email, add
event, add task or email contact. The analytics view gets into reporting to
view reports.
Limitations: I
don’t want to sound like sales rep talking only about the features. Definitely
I want to see lot more additional functionality out-of-box. E.g. adding the
sales catalog and products details attached to the opportunity. This will help
in quickly checking on the product configuration. The next one will be to have
access to iPhone contacts. This way I can add my contact to the opportunity
when required. Adding social network functionality will also help in
participating in conversations through mobile app. I believe some of these are
already in the works and we will see them in subsequent releases. One issue I
encountered with date field is that when picking the date it also picked the
time. When I viewed the same in the web UI the time zone was not changed. May be the app time zone was not captured and
it simply picked the UTC time zone.
Conclusion:
Oracle Fusion Mobile Sales iPhone App is definitely ready for enterprise
customers require mobile functionality to be rolled out.
Disclaimer: I
used RUP2 accessing the SaaS version. RUP3 is already out and may include some new functionality which is not part of this article.
