Why Oracle CX Customers and Partners Should Be Excited About Visual Builder

Oracle Visual Builder has changed my perception of low-code – a declarative development trend that democratizes development tasks.

For years, I understood low-code to be good for employee apps, proofs of concept and other “low-impact” scenarios, or "set and forget" situations where an app could replace a manual process and run without further work. I pigeon-holed low-code due to the lack of inherent connection to the ongoing business operations professionals use to manage a process (for example, customer or partner service).

However, over the past year, I‘ve learned why Oracle Visual Builder is different, and it’s high time the industry learns, too.

Visual Builder is different from standalone low-code solutions

The low-code trend is not particularly young. For more than a decade, these solutions have helped organizations large and small build apps. However, very few solved end-to-end business challenges.

For those unfamiliar with Oracle Visual Builder (VB), it is Oracle’s low-code platform to create and host custom web and mobile apps. Using visual development and integrated agile development, enterprise teams can democratize skills and manage a wide variety of projects across distributed teams. Additionally, VB supports the full development lifecycle flows to streamline ongoing development and testing. But Oracle doesn’t stop there. VB provides hosting for your applications with enterprise scale and security.

The real differentiator, however, is the native integration with Oracle applications, which manifests in three roles:

1. Building the next generation of Oracle applications. VB is the development toolkit that Oracle uses to build its own apps with our next-generation UX design system, Redwood. And because Redwood is built with JET (JavaScript Extension Toolkit), Oracle’s JS library, it’s committed to open web standards, reuse and extensibility. Redwood is responsive by default, so this works across all screen sizes and types, and prioritizes voice- and chat-based engagement for the next generation of productivity.
    
2. Extending Oracle applications with native tools. VB is the toolkit Oracle gives customers to extend Oracle apps with native access to the application services (for example, to create a custom page for an approval or a dashboard). It’s also the visual development and runtime engine for our ‘portal’ solutions for customers (Digital Customer Service) and partners (Partner Relationship Management).
    
3. Building and running bespoke web and mobile apps. VB is the low-code solution for customers and partners to build and run bespoke web and mobile applications, including both native and hybrid mobile apps. 

10 minutes well spent: Get to know Visual Builder’s powerful tools

To learn more about Visual Builder, watch this video by Vik Kumar, Group Manager for CX Sales Product Development.

In this video, Vik shows how to create an application with Oracle Adaptive Search API and populate the data with account objects so that it dynamically refreshes for every search in two easy steps:

• Create a secure service-based application. In just a few clicks, connect VB’s adaptive search service with a back-end data source (for example, Oracle Sales application). With a very user-friendly page designer and out-of-the-box components, you can drag a table component into your page layout. Because this is an account search service, we can map the table headers to the account data fields from the application service.
   
• Dynamically connect the new service to the data. By creating a variable to represent the search input, you can now bind the search to the application service you just created. Using VB’s Action Chain management tooling, you can create the event to trigger fresh data automatically. And voila, you have dynamic search results!

For even more information, check out this more in-depth video: Visual Builder - A Crash Course.

How to get Visual Builder

If you’re an existing Oracle Sales or Service customer or partner, odds are good you already have Oracle Visual Builder. Specifically, those customers and partners running Oracle Sales or Oracle Service for B2B with an Enterprise or Premium subscription have VB by default. Visual Builder also comes with the Oracle Integration solution. Finally, you can simply use Visual Builder via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as part of the free tier or paid solutions. 

Learn more about Oracle Visual Builder here.

Additional Resources:

Visual Builder - A Crash Course (video)

Visual Builder product documentation

Sales product documentation 

Cloud Customer Connect Sales forum 

Cloud Customer Connect VB forum