What’s new in the 18.08 release for the SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud

While most of us are enjoying a well deserved Summer holiday, SAP will upgrade the SAP Sales Cloud and the SAP Service Cloud to the new 18.08 release. In the weekend of July 21st all test tenants will be upgraded, to be followed by the Production tenants in the weekend of August 4th.

This 18.08 release focusses mainly on getting most of the current business user and key-user functionality from HTML5 into the Fiori Client – therefore a lot of lay-out and configuration changes have been added.

As there are quite some changes/enhancements in this new release 18.08, we will try to give you an overview of the main highlights in today’s blog. 

General Announcements

• As of June 2018 SAP Hybris will be known as SAP Customer Experience, with the suite changing its name to SAP C/4HANA. The different functions will now be named: SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud. 
• HTML5 UI will reach End-of-Life in November 2019 (succeeded by Fiori Client/RUI) for all users. Key users and Business users will only have access to the Fiori client UI and can no longer access HTML5 UI with the 1911 release. 

• The current ODATA API ‘c4codataapi’ will be replaced by a new version 2: OData API V2. The new version covers 40+ business objects, allowing read and write access to 1000+ collections. It will provide better performance over the traditional SOAP API. For new projects, it’s recommend to use the newly released OData API V2. (Deprecated API’s will continue to work and be supported until February 2020).
• In the previous release the new theme ‘Belize’ was introduced as a Beta version, this is now general available and can be defaulted in the company settings. From release 1902 onward the current ‘Blue Crystal’ theme will be deprecated.
  

What’s new in Platform & Integration?

• Fiori: Company settings can now also be defined by business role – Settings maintained at Role level override the company settings. If a user has multiple roles assigned with conflicting settings, then the company setting value of this setting takes precedence.
• Fiori: Font type and Font size can now be defined centrally at the company setting level. 
• Fiori: Basic Search now shows the Recently opened items and any Recent searches done by the user.
• Fiori: More personalization options  – End user can now personalize OVS columns, Advanced Search as well as the Quick View in Object List. 
• Mobile: Push notifications will now be send for Approvals – from the push notification you can navigate directly to the object to be approved/rejected.
• Key-user Tool: Sort or Change the display mode for Code Lists. It’s now possible to display the code + value or only code or only value.
• Workflows: A new formula has been introduced to calculate field values in workflow rules. Use basic Mathematical, String and Date/Time calculation expressions to set field values in business objects. 
• Transport Management: Administrators can now transport active business roles across tenants.

What’s new in SAP Sales Cloud?

• General: Enhanced Approval Processing for Lead, Opportunities, Sales Contracts, Sales Quotes and Sales Orders – include 2nd and 3rd level approval and possibility to withdraw object from approval. Users/managers can now directly approve/reject the relevant object via a link in the notification mail.

• Business Partner: Possible to launch the new Customer-360 App in SAP S/4 HANA from within the customer details view – to quickly get a complete overview of the customer data in the S/4 HANA backend.
• Sales Contracts: Territory can now be maintained/ displayed in the sales contract – possible to search ‘contracts in my territory’.
• Sales Contracts: The ECC status can be displayed in SAP Sales Cloud contracts – external ECC status + call-off status.
• Sales Quotes: Versioning – possibility to keep the existing quote ID and create a new version – there can only be one active version.
• Sales Quotes: Data Workbench now also supports import/export of external/internal pricing conditions (only manual conditions can be updated)
• Activities: Out of Office Enhancement  – Alert is displayed when planning an appointment for a user who will be out of office during that time
• Visits: Per visit type it’s now possible to have a specific frequency and duration.
• Surveys: New question Type – Numeric value introduced to capture ‘numbers’ – previously this could only be registered with ‘quantity’ question fields.

What’s new in SAP Service Cloud?

• Communication Channels: New facet ‘Social’ is introduced in which SAP supports Facebook and Twitter interactions – contextual response options and display of images possible.

• Live Activity: Warm Transfer Flow – it is now possible to transfer calls from agent 1 to agent 2 – in which agent 2 sees all the notes of agent 1 – agent 2 adds new notes and transfer to agent 3. All transfers are also captured in document flow.
• Ticket: Enable payment terms, incoterms, delivery priority, blocking terms and credit check for tickets – this is derived directly from the account and can be partially amended in the ticket itself.
• Ticket: Possible to restrict the creation of new tickets by business role.
• Ticket: New conditions have been added to the ticket workflow rules – i.e. credit limit, credit status, blocking terms, payment terms can be used in Ticket Approval process.