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Oracle updates all Planning & Budgeting Cloud environments (PBCS / EPBCS) monthly to address defects and introduce new features. These updates are delivered automatically on specific dates scheduled by Oracle, during the mandatory daily maintenance window. Keep in mind that while you can configure your daily maintenance window time, you can't change the dates these updates are applied. Oracle announces next month's update dates via newsletter at the end of each month.

August 2018 updates are currently scheduled to be deployed in test environments on Friday, August 3rd and to production environments on Friday, August 17th , starting at 10 PM UTC. Any schedule changes are also announced via the newsletter, which is automatically sent to all cloud administrators (keep an eye out for Oracle emails with Enterprise Performance Management Cloud Services in the subject).

These are the highlights of the May 2018 Planning & Budgeting Cloud update:

• The Clone and Incremental Export update I complained about in my July blog post has been reverted . The July update made it so that certain relational artifacts (such as cell text, etc.) could no longer be exported by themselves; only as part of a full snapshot backup. Apparently, I wasn't the only one unhappy with this change since Oracle reverted it due to customer demand.
• A simple but a good one: dashboards and infolets can now be organized under folders making it easier to assign security access in bulk.
• Another simple update that will be welcomed by users: a new setting in Financial Reporting Web Studio can be enabled so that users don't need to re-enter their credentials when running a Financial Reporting batch. Note: for this setting to be enabled the environment must be restarted (whether by EPM Automate or by the daily maintenance window).
• Speaking of FR Studio, starting on this release the desktop version will no longer be available for download by Oracle. And on next month's release, any existing installations of FR Desktop Studio will no longer work with the cloud. We've known this was coming for about a year now, so if you haven't made the switch to Web Studio yet now is a good time to do it! I personally like Web Studio a lot better . It's easy to get to from your cloud console's menu, no install required and no more clunky login window that disappears randomly (a huge pet peeve of mine which never seemed to be fixed through the years).
• Support for the classic dimension editor has been extended through October. If you haven't started using the Simplified Dimension Editor yet you may want to start. I'm torn between the two. I like the copy paste and zoom in/out capabilities of the Simplified Editor for bulk changes, but for small modifications, I prefer the less cluttered, one-member-at-a-time view of the classic editor.
• I commented on the upcoming removal of support for composite forms before. This was supposed to happen in June, but it has now been pushed to January. Be advised that the path forward is to use dashboards instead of composites.

Additional features released in this update include:

• There is a new setting that controls how out of the box currency calculations behave based on scenario definition.
• There is a new properties panel to make infolet formatting easier.
• There is a new version of the Vision sample app that includes recent new features such as infolets, smart forms, etc.
• There is new documentation on how to optimize business rules.

More details including a full list of defects fixed on the August 2018 Planning & Budgeting Cloud update can be found here .