Configuring Fusion Mobile Sales iPhone App from Oracle Fusion CRM Application composer

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.