Upcoming Oracle Financials August 2016 Monthly Release

August 18, 2016

As we have written to you in past publications and other communications, the HUIT Oracle Financials team has been working on the Oracle Financial Platform Improvement (OFPI) project.  This phased project is helping us prepare and execute HUIT and the University to meet the goals of moving towards virtual servers on cloud based technologies for our Oracle Financial software. Some of the benefits we will gain will be cost savings to support and run our financial systems, stronger business continuity and disaster recovery, and enhanced performance and reliability as we move off of our current aging hardware.  One of the first phases of this project that we have focused on is to update several of our custom applications such as PCARD and Web Reimbursement, as the outdated server technologies they run on are expiring very soon.  The current language that these functions are written in is also no longer viable or supportable. HUIT has been in the process of rewriting and testing these functions to accommodate these needed changes in a supportable language (APEX) that would result in the least amount of invasive changes to the end users, and allow us to move forward to having these custom applications run on our future cloud based virtual servers.

Some of these changes will be rolled out in our August Monthly Release and we wanted to bring this to your attention as you will see some noticeable visual differences within the Web Reimbursement responsibilities and menus.  This August Monthly release will be available to users on Wednesday August 24, 2016 and there will be no outages to the community. The following items will be updated in the WV Reimbursement and WV User Preferences responsibilities:

WV Reimbursement

  • Requisition History
  • Reprint Web Reimbursement
  • User Search
  • Open Requisitions
  • Invoice Search

WV User Preferences

  • Account Code List
  • Reimbursement Email Maintenance
  • Harvard Preferences

Please note that the rest of the Web Reimbursement functions (such as Create Reimbursement) will be completed in the March 2017 FINDINI release. For those of you who use PCard, it is expected for you to see those changes completed in the October 2016 FINDINI release.

Training Tips:

Below are screenshots illustrating the current look and feel to the new look and feel, and some notes of changes you will see delivered in this August monthly release.

WV Reimbursement Menu

Invoice Search - Current

 Invoice Search - Current

New Look

 New Look: Invoice Search

Changes:       

  • Addition of Creation Date Search using pop-up calendars
  • Ability to Export information on the Results screen using the new ‘Actions’ button
  • Printable screens when drilling down to additional data
  • Ability to sort results at Header level

Open Requisitions - Current

Open Requisitions - Current

New Look

Open Requisitions - New Look

Changes:       

  • Addition of Creation Date Search using pop-up calendars
  • Smart search of Preparer name
  • Ability to Export information on the Results screen using the new ‘Actions’ button
  • Ability to sort results at Header level

Requisition History – Current

Requisition History - Current

New Look

New Look: Requisition History

Changes:       

  • Creation Date Search using pop-up calendars
  • Smart search of Preparer name
  • Smart search of Approver Name
  • Ability to Export information on the Results screen using the new ‘Actions’ button
  • Printable screens when drilling down to additional data
  • Ability to sort results at Header level

Reprint Web Reimbursement - Current

Reprint Web Reimbursement - Current

New Look

Reprint Web Reimbursement - New

User Search – Current

User Search - Current

User Search - Current

New Look

User Search - New

User Search - New

Changes

  • Printable screens when drilling down to additional data

WV User Preferences

Web Reimbursement Preferences – Current

Web Reimbursement Preferences - Current

New Look

Web Reimbursement Preferences - New Look

Changes:

  • Absence Date Search using pop-up calendars

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - Current

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - Current

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - Current

New Look

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - New Look

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - New Look

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - Current

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - Current

New Look

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - New

Reimbursement Email Maintenance - New

Changes:

  • Clear buttons and ESP fields have been removed
  • Ability to add additional rows
  • Ability to Select lines and Delete rows
  • Ability to Select All and Delete all rows
  • Save/Delete functions will provide message to show action completed

For questions please contact the HUIT Service Desk at ithelp@harvard.edu or call them at 5-7777. Further helpful tips & release information can be found on site http://oracle.fss.finance.harvard.edu/releases.