Contributor: Owen Stone, Senior CX Consultant
If you’ve spent any time configuring Oracle B2C Service, you’ll know how absolutely indispensable Business Rules are. They form the core of B2C Service’s automated decision making, and they’re the key to the processing of data in real–time, from the basics, like routing incoming incidents to the right queue, to the more complex, such as triggering custom code via Object Event handlers. However, the current rule functionality in the .NET framework is starting to show it’s age. To fix this, as of last years 20A release the Enhanced Business Rules available on the BUI have been expanded to work on standard objects as well as custom objects, replacing the older Business Rules.
However, a lot of B2C Service users aren’t aware of this functionality or that Enhanced Business Rules has been steadily to make them more accessible, and make switching a much more desirable choice, unaware of the benefits while still plugging away with the .NET rules which are enabled by default.
SO WHAT DO YOU GET WITH ENHANCED BUSINESS RULES?
Well, apart from a shiny new UI, Enhanced Business Rules can run on custom objects, which is a massive benefit, given how common these are in a modern CX solution. A full Audit Log now saves time managing and monitoring changes to the system. Enhance Rules can also now be exported and imported via the Element Manager, ticking off another time intensive and potentially error-prone task in development to production migrations, and there is now a much more powerful search feature allowing you to search by rules and values, for whenever you’ve ever tried to work out where on earth in your pile of rules that random value is coming from. This is also enhanced by the ability to quickly export rules as a spreadsheet, letting you easily share the rules configuration with those who don’t have admin access.
Most recently, and of immense benefit to those of us who are dealing with 100-odd categories all with different routing rules, there’s now a SWITCH function in addition to the standard IF – THEN – ELSE function that’s served well (if occasionally in some convoluted loops) for many years, allowing you multiple actions from a single trigger.
“But how much effort is migrating?” you might wonder, and the answer is… Pretty much zero. A single click migrates all your existing rules for a particular object to the enhanced model in BUI in about a minute. You can migrate object rules individually… But to be honest, if you’re going to do it, you may as well move them all. We haven’t seen any issues with migrated rules as yet, but you’ll of course want to run some tests when you migrate your own.
The one minor downside is once migrated, you can’t go back to the old .NET business rules… But honestly I’m not sure why you’d want to. The slight downside of having to move to the BUI to administer them is well worth the extra flexibility, and I expect we’ll be seeing more and more admin functions being added to BUI in the near future. Hopefully we might start seeing a few new actions on Business Rules as well (if anyone on the product development team is reading, one that copies objects please! 😉)