The #1 best place to go for Oracle Cloud EPM info (yes, better than this blog) is Cloud Customer Connect. It is part community forum, Oracle training, announcements and guidance from Oracle product managers, and the ONE way to submit enhancements or customer requests for new features, etc. This last component is the focus for this post.
Idea Lab is where everyone can go in and submit an enhancement request and explain why, the business case, etc. Others can review and upvote to indicate their interest in the same thing or downvote if they don't see the need. When I say "others can review," that includes Oracle product managers, who review each idea and, once a direction has been decided by Oracle, will tag for future inclusion, deny, or say the idea is already in the product.
The upvoting portion of the process is the most important for the community and is probably the least underutilized portion of the process. This is the mechanism for the community to review and indicate their interest in the ideas. Ideas that receive a lot of upvotes are considered more seriously by Oracle as they have more demonstrated appeal.
Here's an example. In a navigation flow, you can create a new card to Narrative Reporting report, package, snapshot, or book (see below). All that is great. But what would be much more useful would be to create a card that links to a Narrative Reporting folder. That way, for instance, with one click on a card in FCC, users would be able to access all of the FCC reports. With the current ability, the admin would have to create a card for each one. If there are 50, then that would be 50 cards. Add a new report, add a new card. This does not make sense!
In Idea Lab, there is an idea to add a folder to the above list. Here's the link (login with free Cloud Customer Connect account required):
Down near the bottom is the place to upvote/downvote. To do so, click the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" icons. Maybe this navigation, which isn't exactly obvious, is the reason there isn't much up/down voting. Once the choice is clicked, it will fill in (here, I have already upvoted this idea). Users can also add comments to explain their support, add additional business cases, add workarounds, etc.
I think that upvoting ideas is highly underutilized by the community. By upvoting ideas that make sense to them, users can add their influence to the idea which will increase the appeal of the idea to Oracle.
So, get out and vote!
