Connecting Oracle B2C Service with the world using the External Objects (XO) feature – EP0

Oracle B2C service has been helping hundreds of customers to serve their customers efficiently for nearly two decades. Consumers (End-customers) of today have higher expectations from their service providers, and it’s always challenging to match up with fast paced changes in consumer behaviour. Oracle B2C Service is committed to help our customers to match with these expectations and evolve by enabling them to rapidly adapt to the continuously changing business needs, provide consistent and insightful interactions, and support their employees in delivering proven and reliable service. In this blog, we are exploring the challenges our customers face when they want to connect to other services to view the data stored in those services, and the XO feature provided by B2C service, which is a powerful and flexible way to solve this

Want to create Reports of External Data in Oracle B2C Service?

Sometimes, customers maintain their data in multiple systems, one such example is where a customer is storing their asset/equipment information in a system residing in the customer’s datacenter which can be accessed using an OData end point. This Asset Management System, may expose standard CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) APIs in OData format, either directly or by using an adapter. If the customer wants to see those equipment reports in Oracle B2C Service, the service center has to maintain data in both Oracle B2C Service and in their Asset Management System. However, Maintaining data in multiple systems comes with the risk of the data going out of sync, and the customer may need to bring in additional systems/processes to ensure that the data always stays in sync.

Now, How can our B2C Service solve this? Using the External Objects (XO) feature…

Using the XO feature, the customer can connect Oracle B2C Service to the OData endpoint of such Asset Management Systems, and easily use the data points to create reports in Oracle B2C Service for analysis, and derive the best insights to serve their customers at the highest standards. With XO, our customers do not need to replicate their data in Oracle B2C Service, and hence can forget about the worry of data mismatch.

Want to connect to External Services without exposing Credentials?

Other times, our customers want to integrate Oracle B2C Service with other services using Agent Browser UI Extensions (BUI extensions). For example, a customer maintains the order details of their different child products/brands in different systems, and wants to use Oracle B2C Service to view the snapshots of these order details. The customer can use Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) to connect these backend systems and use BUI extensions to call the order details to Oracle B2C Service. However, while using a BUI extension, either the customers have to risk exposing credentials of their systems, to their agents, or write several layers of code to protect the credentials from exposure.

Now, How can our B2C Service solve this? Using the External Objects (XO) feature…

That’s right… A customer can use the XO feature to configure a connection to their systems, by saving the connection details and credentials inside Oracle B2C Service. Now the BUI extension can authenticate and communicate with the customer’s endpoint by invoking the XO connection. The BUI extension only knows about the XO connection, and not any sensitive information or credentials which are safely stored within Oracle B2C Service.

Now, what is XO? Jump to our next episode of the series…

References to know more

OData

Next Episode: Exploring External Object Feature