Oracle Redwood: an amazing step forward

Earlier this year, my colleague Gary wrote a blog about how the Redwood requirements could be seen as a challenge. At the recent Ascend user conference, this was a big topic, so I thought I’d talk a little bit more about what Redwood is and some of those challenges.

First, it's really important to say that Redwood is an amazing step forward, not a problem. And once you are on Redwood, the benefits will really outweigh any challenges you had getting there.

A bit about Redwood

You’re probably already using Redwood. Most organizations are now using journeys for at least their onboarding, as Redwood replaced onboarding checklists some time ago and they’re mandatory by 24D. So, you will probably know how good the user experience is on a Redwood page.  

Redwood is not just the UI. It is Oracle’s complete approach to making their technology better for customers: the way they work, the way they interact with their customers, and the way their customers interact with their applications.

What we refer to as Redwood in Oracle Fusion is the content or pages written using Visual Builder Studio (VBS), Oracle’s low code development platform. All new functionality being introduced is Redwood and there’s a program of replacement for existing pages.

Here are just a few of the benefits of Visual Builder:

• It’s device agnostic, so it will work equally well on smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktops.
• New inbuilt features like Oracle Search are core. An easy place to see this is in Connections, where search looks at all fields, not just one.
• VBS encompasses and integrates functionalities previously handled by the different tools for Responsive UI and Classic pages.
• Oracle’s roll out of its embedded generative AI is made possible because of the Visual Builder technology they’re pivoting towards in Fusion.

Visual Builder Studio is a new skill but I am very impressed with the online learning made available by Oracle.

Now let’s look at some challenges

Why move to Redwood is straightforward. Added to the benefits above is user-friendly experiences, and that Oracle is exclusively delivering new functionalities through Redwood.

However, the actual migration may present some challenges.

Challenges may exist when Redwood is replacing existing responsive UI pages that offered the ability to configure and extend for your organization. If you used these features, you need Redwood to allow you to replicate what you did.  

The biggest stumbling block we’ve seen has been the maturity of released Redwood pages. Oracle provides a schedule of when pages will be available in Redwood, but what gets delivered may not be full functionality. In many cases what’s delivered is the minimal viable product for that page to work as expected in Fusion.

Initially we fell afoul of this ‘gotcha’. Now we recognize this and factor it into planning rollouts. We tend to move forward with Self Service— both Employee and Manager—but are more careful with the admin pages. This hybrid approach allows you to start seeing benefits now and reduces the workload later.

So how best to move forward?

There's no simple answer unless you’re a new customer, in which case I recommend you go straight to Redwood, and in fact Oracle are ensuring that new instances only have that choice.

If you are a customer with very few personalizations and business rules, then moving to Redwood for each of your pages should be straightforward. However, if you’ve taken advantage of configure and extend options, how do you determine what you should do and how to adopt Redwood?

I think you need to look at your setup and weigh it up against what else you’re doing in your system. What other innovation are you adopting, and what is your organization’s roadmap like?  

If you’re live but doing a roll out to another organization or geography, do you introduce Redwood there because they’re less likely to be in the “I preferred it the old way” mindset? However, that may compromise your global design… so there are many things to be taken into consideration.

Oracle has provided some tools such as the Redwood Personalization Helper to help you identify what needs to change, and has improved communicating the limitations for each page in each of the quarterly update release notes. They also provide some advice and approach options, and this is also where a partner that’s done this already can help.

Once you do decide to move, don’t simply try and duplicate what you did before. Ask yourself what you were trying to achieve. Because there may be a better way of doing that today than when you first implemented.

Inoapps has done this for several customers now, and we've been hurt by some of those challenges and learnt from them. But we’re also an Oracle Fusion customer ourselves and have adopted Redwood in HCM—in journeys, which we use for both onboarding and performance, in time for our annual review cycle that’s just started.

If you’d like to know how to plot your way to Redwood, get in touch with the experts at Inoapps and we can help you navigate your journey.