| April 2021 Edition Oracle Developer Partner Community Newsletter |
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| Learn how to create new service offerings and solutions for Oracle SaaS solution based on the Oracle Cloud Platform |
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| Dear Developer Partner Community, |
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Bots are the future? In fact, if you're wondering whether your business should create a bot, you're asking the wrong question. Bot-powered commerce is the future. This technology is still in its infancy, so most bots follow a set of rules programmed by a human via a bot-building platform, and one of them is Oracle Digital Assistant. In April we offer Chatbot introduction and hands-on training's. In these 4 sessions you will learn what is Oracle Digital Assistant and what features are provided to build machine learning powered chatbots. Moreover, we will demonstrate how to create code-free a conversation in a matter of minutes. The series completes with best practices to create an awesome digital assistant experience. In case you can’t attend these live training’s, access the football chatbot blog series.
How to make your chatbot project successful? Scott Wall describes the 4 success factors.
The latest release of the WebLogic for OCI / OKE and WLSDM offerings are available in Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Want to promote Your services and apps? Submit your offering here and see the documentation here. |
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| Chatbot introduction hands-on workshop series April 2021 |
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In fact, if you're wondering whether your business should create a bot, you're asking the wrong question. Bot-powered commerce is the future. Attend the Oracle Digital Assistant free hands-on training's.
Schedule: April 20, April 22, April 27 and April 29, 2021 17:00 - 19:00 CET
(Berlin time)
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| Identity Propagation call from Integration Cloud to SaaS |
| Partner Community Webcast April 27th, 2021 |
| One of the big challenges that Oracle Integration Cloud developers face is any outbound REST call from Integration Cloud (IC) to Fusion Applications (FA) APIs require a user’s identity. Although this may seem trivial on the surface, the mechanism to have the identity of a user flow from a client application to IC to FA in a secure fashion is not trivial. |
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However, there is a proven pattern that can be leveraged with Oracle Cloud technologies to solve this problem and the following presentation will illustrate this pattern.
Speaker: Greg Mally & Deepak Arora
Schedule: Tuesday April 27th, 16:30 – 17:30 CET (Berlin time) |
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| Free Oracle trainings: take the opportunity to watch our community webcasts on-demand |
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| Cloud Platform Partner YouTube Update April 2021 |
| This months video includes three topics: |
• Chatbot hands-on training’s
• Integration customer newsletter
• Identity propagation webcast
For regular updates please subscribe to our YouTube channel here. |
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| Become a Certified Oracle Expert |
| Enablement & certification is key to cloud success |
At the Oracle Competence Center and Online Learning Library partners can attend free on-line classes and certifications. Additional we offer the latest implementation exams ($245 or free vouchers) for:
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| Resources Developer Partner Community |
| Oracle Digital Assistant |
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4 Key Factors that Determine Chatbot Project Success by Scott Wall
Fishbowl’s team of experts has been working with chatbots, specifically Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) since its inception in 2017. Our expertise has been used to create chatbots with conversational design in mind to enhance the overall ODA experience. Through personalized branding, channels, integrations with Oracle Cloud HCM and Oracle Service Cloud, as well as other 3rd party integrations like Zendesk, we have been able to build and go-live on several successful chatbots with customers in the North American market.
That being said, our success has been earned through some bruised elbows and scraped knees. We have seen first-hand chatbot projects that fail. While such projects fail for different reasons, we have learned that it really comes down to 4 key factors. Factors that occur before, during, and after the project is “complete”. And chatbot projects are never really complete – see number 4 below. Instead, you should expect and want to improve your chatbot incrementally over time. Let’s get started with our list:
1. You can’t just turn a chatbot on and have it work.
• Conversational design is a skill and requires consideration and effort. Natural Language Processing requires knowledge, repetition, and multiple iterations to implement a successful chatbot.
• Each business and their use cases are different, so even out-of-the-box solutions will need some degree of customization. Without customization and understanding the verbiage and business language used by end users, the chatbot will miss intents and misunderstand users.
Three Ways Oracle Digital Assistant Creates Customer Service Success by Carrie West
A few months ago, I was in the middle of renovating my kitchen. I’d purchased all of the appliances online from a big box retailer, but when it came time to install the stove, I realized that I never received the connector to hook it up to the gas line. I did what many Gen Xers do—I opened my iPad, went to the store’s website, and clicked the “Live Chat” button.
After a few quick questions to validate my identity, the digital assistant found my order number and had me confirm which item I was contacting them about. When I indicated it was the stove, the bot recommended a set of accessories that might be relevant, including the gas connector. It then verified the correct part was in stock and could ship overnight to arrive in time for my installation to proceed on schedule. Simple, quick, and all seamlessly completed through automation.
How it works
As we discussed in our recent Quarterly Update on Innovations for Advertising and Customer Experience, it all starts with the routing engine.
When a user engages with a brand through their channel of choice (Facebook, mobile, SMS, etc.) to make a request, question, or inquiry, it goes immediately into the service routing engine. That engine contains queues, and within those queues sit both live agents and digital assistants. Based on the nature of the question, the routing engine automatically determines in real time whether a bot can suitably resolve the question or the customer needs human expertise.
Build a Football Chatbot with Oracle Digital Assistant Series by Daniel Teixeira
Thanks for the wonderful blog series to create an ODA chatbot:
Build a Football Chatbot with the Oracle Digital Assistant – Part 1
Build a Football Chatbot with the Oracle Digital Assistant – Part 2 (Backend Integration)
Digital Assistant – Part 3 (Channels)
Updated Backend Integration with Node.js Bot SDK for the Football Chatbot
Build a FAQ Chatbot with Oracle Digital Assistant in 15 minutes.
How can a chatbot help increase employee engagement and productivity? By fishbowl
Join Oracle and Fishbowl Solutions for a webinar as they discuss and demo how the Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) integrated with Oracle Cloud HCM can help employees find information and complete tasks easily. Learn about the out-of-the-box skills available in ODA for Oracle Cloud HCM and how these can be turned on in a few, simple steps. See customer examples of ODA in production, and how it is being used through desktop and mobile interfaces. We will also share how ODA can be integrated with other systems like Kronos to surface additional back-end data to the user.
HCM Skill Learning Path
The ‘CDEF’ 4 Phases Framework consists of 8 training units
• HCM Assistant Learning Path 1 - Config (Getting Started)
• HCM Assistant Learning Path 2 - Deploy (Go-live)
• HCM Assistant Learning Path 3 - Extend
• HCM Assistant Learning Path 4 - Forward
At the conclusion of this track, participants will be able to set up and test the FADigitalAssistant especially the HCM skill.
With Oracle, Yokeru calls thousands of households during COVID
London-based brothers dial up Oracle for Startups and Oracle Digital Assistant to build an automated call system to check in on vulnerable shut-ins.
Products
• Oracle Digital Assistant
Business challenges
Monty and Hector Alexander had the idea to found Yokeru after their grandmother fell at home and was left unattended for eight hours. Monty, 25, a mechanical engineering student at Imperial College London, and his brother, Hector, built an automated call system to check in on vulnerable individuals with the help of Oracle for Startups and Oracle Digital Assistant.
It’s now clear that remote monitoring is pivotal to the future of the care system. Yokeru offers a digitally inclusive way to support those who would otherwise suffer in silence.
Yokeru’s first deployment was with Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Starting in May 2020, Yokeru regularly called 9,000 residents and connected them to specific help if they requested it. Today, Yokeru works with a number of local authorities to support vulnerable communities.
Sharing A Skill With Sample Code For Using The ICU Message Format In Oracle Digital Assistant by Frank Nimphius
I 've always been a proponent of using resource bundles in chatbots instead of putting message and prompt strings directly into the dialog flow code. The option in Oracle Digital Assistant 20.12 and later to create multilingual bots via the multilingual NLU (watch a video about this) does prove me right.
However, I do recommend that you ALWAYS use resource bundles, even if you don't need a multilingual bot or if you use a translation services.
Oracle Digital Assistant 20.12 introduced not only a multilingual NLU, but also a new extended message format for creating resource bundle strings.
Beside others, the new ICU (International Components for Unicode) message format allows you to print messages and prompts based on a condition like the messenger channel being used and to detect plural vs. singular cases requiring different bot responses.
Building A Frequently Asked Question Skill Using A Programming By Convention Approach by Frank Nimphius
The concept of convention over configuration as a paradigm in framework development to facilitate the decisions developers must make, can be implemented in Oracle Digital Assistant to build skills that answer frequently asked questions.
This article explains how to create frequently asked question chatbots (skills) without coding by following a set of naming convention rules.
The starting point of this approach is a skill template sample that I provide at the end of this article. The skill contains all of the dialog flow coding required to make this work.
Note: This article does not explain how the provided skill template works but how to use the template for building custom Frequently Asked Questions skill bots. To understand how the template, and thus the "programming by convention" implementation works, please read the commends added to the BotML in the dialog flow.
About Building A Frequently Asked Questions Skill
Effortless App Development with Oracle Visual Builder: Boost productivity by building web and mobile applications efficiently using the drag-and-drop approach – book by Ankur Jain
Organizations are moving their applications, data, and processes to the cloud to reduce application costs, effort, and maintenance. However, adopting new technology poses challenges for developers, solutions architects, and designers due to a lack of knowledge and appropriate practical training resources. This book helps you get to grips with Oracle Visual Builder (VB) and enables you to quickly develop web and mobile applications and deploy them to production without hassle.
This book will provide you with a solid understanding of VB so that you can adopt it at a faster pace and start building applications right away. After working with real-time examples to learn about VB, you'll discover how to design, develop, and deploy web and mobile applications quickly. You'll cover all the VB components in-depth, including web and mobile application development, business objects, and service connections. In order to use all these components, you'll also explore best practices, security, and recommendations, which are well explained within the chapters. Finally, this book will help you gain the knowledge you need to enhance the performance of an application before deploying it to production.
By the end of this book, you will be able to work independently and deploy your VB applications efficiently and with confidence.
What you will learn
• Get started with VB and explore its architecture and basic building blocks
• Gain a clear understanding of business objects and learn how to manage them
Monitoring Visual Builder Apps with Oracle Application Performance Monitoring by Shay Shmeltzer
Tracking and monitoring the end user interactions with your Visual Builder application is key in creating a better user experience. Knowing information such as which pages are being used the most, the performance of REST calls, and how often do users encounter errors can help deliver a better user experience to customers. It can help you tune your app to achieve better performance too. The new Oracle Application Performance Monitoring (Oracle APM), part of the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform, provides a great solution for tracking what is happening in your Visual Builder apps from the client perspective. In this blog we'll show you how to get the combination of VB and APM working.
The new version of Oracle APM, released earlier this month, includes a browser agent solution that can be used for tracking any web app. The data it collects is gathered in a queriable repository and let you explore multiple dimensions of your app. From looking at high-level statistics about app usage such as type of browser used, overall response times and error rates - all the way to individual interactions and the time it took to invoke specific REST calls in a page.
Performance Optimization for Visual Builder Apps by Shay Shmeltzer
This month's Visual Builder Office Hour meeting was dedicated to covering tips and techniques for optimizing the performance of your Visual Builder Apps. If you miss it you can catch the recording below.
Some additional resources & reading material on points that were covered in the webcast:
• Pagination in table and lists explained
• Using ADPs in higher scopes for list of values
• Merging SDPs on a page
• Run in parallel
• Client Caching for Business Objects
• Optimizing your application for deployment
Here is the replay of our seminar with these and other tips:
Working with Action Cards in Visual Builder by Shay Shmeltzer
With each new version of Visual Builder we adopt a new version of Oracle JET - which results in new components that you can leverage to enhance your app's user interface. Action Card is a new component in JET that was added to JET in release 9.1, and to Visual Builder in release 21.04. Action Cards provide a visually appealing way to show information and drive action on it with an animation effect during mouse hover/focus.
In the demo below you'll learn how to add an action card to your page, style it, and bind it to a set of data. We start by binding a new SDP to a REST service returning a collection of data, then use a for-each component to iterate over the collection and show a card for each record. |
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The NEW WebLogic Server Remote Console by Monica Riccelli
We are very excited to announce the release of the WebLogic Server Remote Console (remote console). The remote console is a modern, lightweight, open-source console that you can use to manage and monitor your WebLogic Server 12.2.1.3, 12.2.1.4 and 14.1.1 domains. It is offered as an alternative to the WebLogic Server Administration Console (administration console) web application, which Oracle continues to support. In the remote console GitHub project https://github.com/oracle/weblogic-remote-console you will find the “How to get Started” guide and documentation.
The remote console is an application that runs on your local desktop and can connect to a WebLogic Server domain running in a physical or virtual machine, in a container, in Kubernetes, or in the Oracle Cloud. You simply start the console application, display the console UI in your browser, and connect to the Administration Server of the WebLogic Server domain using WebLogic Server REST APIs. The remote console is a new option for managing WebLogic Server that provides a number of key benefits:
• It starts up fast
The remote console application is built on Helidon, a set of Java libraries for building lightweight applications and microservices, including microservices that interact with WebLogic Server. Go to helidon.io for more information.
Oracle WebLogic Server for OCI/OKE March release by Adrian Padilla Duarte
We’re pleased to announce the availability of the March release of the Oracle WebLogic offerings available in Oracle Cloud Marketplace. The new features available in this release are:
Simplified backup and replication: OCI provides a feature, called OCI custom images, that allows users to backup or replicate an existing compute instance, with the customizations, software and configurations that have been included in the instance. You can now backup and replicate your Oracle WebLogic For OCI configuration using OCI Compute Custom images. Any compute instance created using Oracle WebLogic Server for OCI release version 21.1.3 or later are enabled to create custom images. These custom images are not exportable to other regions and do not include attached block volumes. To learn more about OCI custom images see the OCI documentation here.
• Oracle WebLogic Server for OCI Disaster Recovery support for File Storage Service: Prior to this release we have supported the use of the DataBase File Service (DBFS) for ongoing replication of primary WebLogic Server for OCI configurations to standby configurations for disaster recovery purposes. In this release we additionally support use of the OCI File Storage Services (FSS) for this replication. The Disaster Recovery Guide now includes instructions to use FSS instead of DBFS to configure the staging mounts for WebLogic config replication.
Kotlin + Helidon by Mitia Alexandrov
Let me tell you about my first experience using Kotlin with Helidon. (Trust me, its a good story!) I was writing code and wanted to refactor it in some way. I looked at some of the menus in Intellij Idea, and I saw an option to “Convert to Kotlin” or I could use the key combination “⌥⇧⌘K” (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K). And I love Kotlin. Hmm… I was curious, so I switched to our Helidon SE Quickstart project, pressed the key combination mentioned above, and voilà! all of my code automatically converted to Kotlin. Then, to test the code, I went directly in the IDE and pressed the start button - and it worked! I really liked Kotlin and how easy it was to use, but I needed to try it with some other code.
Build a Kafka Cluster on an Oracle Kubernetes Engine by Michel Schildmeijer
Messaging is an important part of Middleware platforms. It is in fact an essential part for integrating and distributing data amongst source and target systems. With the rise of application and data integration patterns, message brokers became an important part in handling and transferring data in a solid and secure matter, in the most optimal way with a minimum of loss of data during transfer.
Traditional ways of messaging and message brokers can be divided into several parts:
Less intelligent
JMS – Java Messaging
JMS offers a set of APIs for messaging: put a message on a queue and someone else, sometime later, perhaps a far distance from each other, takes the message off the queue and processes it. It is decoupled in time and location of the message provider and consumer. Even if the message consumer happens to be down for a time, messages can be reproduced.
WLSDM Operation Center
WL-OPC (WLSDM operation center) is the central Operation and Notification system
which enables to manage Application Server infrastructure.
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| Additional new material Developer Community |
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- Announcing the release of solutions to run Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as part of a broad-ranging partnership between Microsoft and Oracle. Learn more about how to run Oracle WebLogic Server on the Azure Kubernetes Service.
- Accelerate the lift and shift of your Java EE applications to the cloud with Oracle WebLogic Server on Azure. Watch the video now.
- WebLogic Kubernetes Operator 3.2.0 is now available and includes support for dynamic / online updates with model-in-image, support for Oracle Linux 8, additional lifecycle events, and more. More details can be found here.
- WebLogic Server for Java takes Wall Street Take a deep, technical dive into Java’s long history on Wall Street. From the rise of high-frequency trading in the early 2000s to cryptocurrencies and blockchain today, Java has been a fundamental enabler for trading and investment platforms.
- Java for the enterprise: What to expect in Jakarta EE 10
- Favorite Java things The new Java 16 is packed with more goodness than a clown car. Experts pick their favorite features, including improved memory management, enhanced support for modern processors, and Alpine Linux compatibility, making Java friendlier to cloud native apps.
- Oracle Developer Live: AI and ML for Your Enterprise On demand
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| Training Calendar |
| For the latest trainings please visit our Training Wiki. |
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| Join the Oracle Developer Meetup groups |
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Want to learn more about developing Enterprise-grade Cloud Native applications on the Oracle Cloud Platform, covering topics like Microservices Architecture, developing in Node, Python and PHP, using Low Code development tools to build Mobile apps, and much more?
Join the Oracle Developer Meetup groups if you want to follow Oracle’s solutions in this area, or participate in the events and hands-on labs we organize:
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| Since 2007 we host a regular partner community webcast. In 92 editions we covered a wide range from topics including the ROI, governance and architecture of integration. We were fortune to welcome special guest like Thomas Erl, Amit Zavery, Vikas Anand or Clements Utschig-Utschig. |
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| Many of the most recent webcast with Niall Commiskey including HCM, ERP, CX and NetSuite integration are available at Oracle Video Hub and YouTube. Which is the first edition you attended? Let us know, send us a tweet #OracleDeveloperCommunity! |
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