A technical overview of how we built the Sales Cloud Day Planner

This technical blog is a step by step guide on how we created a visual tool within Oracle Sales Cloud, to allow sales users to easily manage their daily workload.

We were recently faced with the requirement of creating a visual tool to allow sales users to manage their workload from within an Oracle Sales Cloud environment. We created the Day Planner; a single report combining Leads, Opportunity and Activity records that require a sales user's attention. The Day Planner improves the user's experience giving them access to the records they need, with less time spent searching for the records they should be updating.

This is a technical blog post that covers, in quite some detail, how we have achieved the visual elements of the report. If you're interested about the business benefits behind the tool we created, you can read more in this separate blog post discussing these.

Adding visual elements to the BI Analysis #

Sales Cloud's (part of the Oracle CX Cloud product suite) Simplified UI makes use of colourful icons to represent objects. We wanted to include these icons in the report to quickly alert users to which records were listed in the report, but also to improve the user experience. The icons were chosen to provide consistency as they transition between the Sales Cloud application they're used to, and the Day Planner report.

I took a copy of the icons used in Simplified UI and hosted them in Sales Cloud’s WebCenter (Navigator > Spaces > WebCenter Services).

I created a new Document Exchange area called ‘images’ and uploaded all of the icons there:

The URL of the icon is required for the icon to display in BI. Right-click an image, choose ‘Get a Link’ and copy the ‘Download URL’.

Building the report in OTBI #

We're using Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) to create the Day Planner, which comes as standard with any Sales Cloud environment. The main sales transactional database is queried when a user runs any OTBI report, so a Data Warehouse or ETL process isn't required. This means that whenever a user views the day planner, the data is completely up-to-date. Below, we'll look at how we can create some visual elements in OTBI.

For each of the Subject Areas used in the Day Planner report, add a new criteria column and specify the Icon URL it relates to. As Activities are further separated into Task, Appointment and Call Report, I’ve used a CASE Switch function on the ‘Activity Function Name’ column to display the relevant icon URL:

Under Result Columns, select the URL column you've just created and change the Data Format to ‘Image URL’. This will display the icon in the results table instead of the text.

Not all users will be completely familiar with the icons and what they represent, so creating a legend to add to the report would avoid any confusion. Create a new Analysis, and from the Result tab, add a Legend view.

The Legend can be created by specifying the same image URLs that are included in the Criteria Columns, but also adding a static text explanation:

Save the legend as an analysis. We’ll be adding this alongside the report to a dashboard later.

The final visual aspect I added to the report is the overdue flag. To create this, I added a new result column for each of the subject areas and used a case statement to return ‘Y’ if the object’s close/due date is in the past. For example, the CRM Pipeline subject area for Opportunities:

I then simply used some conditional formatting on the Overdue Flag column to display one of the core, "out of the box" (OOTB), Sales Cloud icons if the value is ‘Y’:

By default, the image included in the Conditional Formatting will be displayed alongside the original value. This would display a list of Boolean values, some of which would have a red icon next to them:

To get around this, we can override the default data format of the overdue column. Change the type to ‘Custom Text Format’ and enter a space.

The overdue column will now display an image if the date is in the past or display a blank space if it isn't:

Creating the Infolet tiles #

As well as being visually appealing, we wanted the report to be easy for users to access. We could have given the workforce a static link to the report that they could add to their bookmarks and access whenever they needed to, but this would create a disjointed user experience where users would be taken away from Sales Cloud when they wanted to check the report.

We decided to add the Day Planner to the Sales Infolet page on Simplified UI, an area of Sales Cloud that arrived with Release 10. The Sales Infolet page brings a couple of advantages:

• Users can access the page either by swiping right on a tablet device, or by clicking the ‘next page’ icon from the Sales Cloud home page:

• Infolet Tiles can be different sizes, or animated. Various levels of information can be included in a single tile by using a ‘back’ and ‘expanded’ view. Users can access the different information with a single click:

The Infolet Tile is simply another BI Analysis and, in this example, gives a sum of the number of items on the Day Planner. This requires the same criteria and filters as the Day Planner report but needs a fact to display the number of records.

Start with a copy of the initial report, but add a new result column to each Subject Area counting the Record Id:

In the Results pane, remove the table of results and select a Performance Tile from the ‘Views’ section:

BI will do most of the work so the tile should just need styling. The size is defaulted to a 1x1 tile, but the Sales Infolet page allows sizes up to 3x2. Select ‘Properties’ to modify the sizing:

The list below details the pixel sizes for the different tile sizes (size: width (px); height (px))

1x1: 135; 135

1x2: 335; 135

1x3: 520; 135

2x1: 130; 300

2x2: 330; 300

2x3: 520; 300

3x1: 145; 485

Select the ‘Text Formatting’ icon next to every area to modify the font, colour, etc.:

This finalises the ‘front’ view of the Infolet Tile and will allow users to very quickly view how many records they need to work on.

To give slightly more information, we've used the ‘expanded view’ of the tile to give visibility of the top 3 items in the day planner. I chose the ‘expanded view’ instead of the ‘back view’ so that we could use a different sized tile. The day planner is sorted by due date, so the top 3 items will be the next 3 items due. To create this, take another copy of the Day Planner report. Instead of adding a performance tile, keep the table of results but modify the table to only include the icon image, name, due date and overdue flag.

Open the table properties and limit the ‘Rows per Page’ to 3 and switch the ‘Paging Controls’ to ‘Hide’. This will only display three records in the table, but remove the ability for users to see more:

Creating the Dashboard #

We need to add the Day Planner Analysis and the Legend Analysis to a Dashboard to allow us to embed the Day Planner onto the Sales Infolet Page. Create a new Dashboard with two columns next to each other. Drag the Day Planner Analysis in the left column and the Legend Analysis in the right column:

Open the Properties popup for the left column and specify a width of 700px. This will avoid any unwanted scrollbars being added to the report:

We want to ensure that the Legend is always visible on the report so users can always establish which record type the icon relates to. To achieve this, we can use CSS to fix the position of the legend relative to the area it’s embedded into. Open the Properties popup for the right column and check the ‘Use Custom CSS Style’ checkbox and enter the CSS as per the image below (we have tested this down to iPad size, but the fixed position may need further testing for different screen sizes). Increase the percentage to move the Legend further to the right:

Finally, we need to modify the BI Dashboard to have the ‘Fuse’ Style added to it (this gives the Simplified UI ‘Fuse’ theme to the report, rather than the default, older, Desktop UI ‘Skyros’ theme). Open the Dashboard Properties and choose the ‘Fuse’ Style:

Embedding everything into Sales Cloud #

The reports are now ready to be embedded into the Sales Infolet Page! In a sandbox, open Page Composer and navigate to the Sales Infolet page. To add the tiles, simply select the folder icon and ‘New Tile’. Click ‘Add Content’ and use the popup to navigate to the tiles you created.

In the popup, select size as ‘1 X 1’ for the front view, but ‘1 X 2’ for the expanded view:

Select the Tile Properties, choose ‘Link Detailed Report’, click ‘Add Content’ and then specify the Day Planner Dashboard:

Users can now access the report easily from the Sales Infolet Page, with the tiles giving multiple views of the same information.

The video below shows how users can make use of the Day Planner report on a daily basis:

Conclusion #

We’ve utilised some OOTB Sales Cloud features to turn quite a simple BI Analysis into a visual way for sales users to be view their required tasks and manage their workload. The report could easily be expanded to give a ‘Team Planner’ for Sales Managers, or the criteria could be expanded to only display very specific records.

While this blog post doesn’t look too much at the specifics of the BI Analysis, we’re currently running a series of posts detailing best practices for creating OTBI reports. We've also blogged in the past about creating multi subject area reports.

Ask the experts #

If improving the productivity of your sales teams or enhancing your Sales Cloud user experience is a priority for your organisation, email us at [email protected] or call us today on +44 203 2834315.

Boxfusion Consulting are a Platinum Specialized Oracle implementation partner with Oracle Sales Cloud and our team would be delighted to discuss how your organisation can benefit from advanced analytics and business intelligence with Oracle Sales Cloud.