Oracle delivers quarterly updates to Fusion Cloud Applications that can benefit your business, providing a competitive edge through technical innovations and new capabilities. These updates include new features, bug fixes, security enhancements, and regulatory updates. Staying informed about them empowers you to make better decisions around how and when to adopt new capabilities to ensure your organization remains agile and efficient. This article will help you understand the information you need to stay on top of quarterly updates—and where to turn when you need to learn more.
Understanding the types of changes
Updates to Oracle Fusion Applications typically fall into three categories:
1. Fixes: These are patches that address bugs or security vulnerabilities. They are designed to improve the stability and security of your applications.
2. Ready for use by end users: These are enhancements or new features with minor impact that are immediately available and enabled by default. They often involve user experience improvements, small functional tweaks, or optimizations that don’t require much configuration.
3. New functionality: These are significant new features or modules that require an explicit opt in). They’re often delivered with setup options and configurations if they involve new business processes. Because they’re not automatically enabled, you have control over when and how you add them to your Fusion Apps instance.
It’s vital to understand that fixes and ready-for-use-by-end-users changes are shipped enabled. This means they will automatically go into production with each quarterly update. This automatic enablement ensures that critical fixes are applied promptly and that minor enhancements are immediately accessible, minimizing the need for manual intervention.
What you really need to know about updates—and when
The most important information you need to track revolves around new functionality that requires you to opt in. You need to know:
- What new features are available
- What the features do and how they work
- Prerequisites or configuration steps
- The potential impact on your business processes and users
- When the features become available
Best practice is to review quarterly update information before updates are applied to your production environment. That provides an opportunity to understand new functionality that will be shipped enabled—and to evaluate the potential upside of opt-in features—before any changes occur or decisions need to be made. Oracle provides a detailed schedule of quarterly releases, allowing you ample time to plan. Updates are typically applied to your test environments two weeks before your production environment, which gives you the chance to evaluate and test new features.
Must-know information and where to find it
Two key sources of information that you should keep handy and refer to are:
1. What’s new” documentation on the Oracle Cloud Applications Readiness site: Designed for proactive readiness and planning, this is your primary source for understanding new functionality. The documents are organized by product family (e.g., Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, HCM, etc.), with each one detailing information about a single solution area (e.g., “Accounting Hub What’s New 25D”). These documents provide release notes, feature overviews, and detailed information on enablement and configuration. (The site includes NetSuite and Industries applications, too.)
2. Release notes on My Oracle Support (MOS): While the “What’s new” documents mentioned above focus on features, MOS release notes provide technical and post-release information, including comprehensive details on all changes. You’ll need an active MOS account to access this. (Search for “Fusion Applications Release Readiness” or specific application release notes.)
Nice-to-know information and where to find it
Beyond the essentials, additional information can help you get the most out of Fusion Applications. While not critical for every update, these resources offer deeper insights, community support, and the opportunity to weigh in.
- Oracle Cloud Customer Connect: This is an online community where you can connect with other Oracle users, ask questions, share best practices, and get information directly from Oracle product managers. You can vote on enhancements or make suggestions of your own. It’s a great place to understand other customers’ real-world experiences with new features and get tips for adoption. You need an active subscription and a Cloud Customer Connect account to access this community.
- Oracle live webcasts and training: Oracle frequently hosts webcasts and offers training sessions that walk through new features. These can be particularly helpful for visual learners and for getting direct answers to your questions. Keep an eye on the Cloud Customer Connect events main page and Oracle official events page for announcements.
- Product-specific blogs: Many product teams maintain blogs that offer deeper dives into specific features, use cases, and strategic guidance. Regularly checking these blogs can provide valuable context and practical advice. Good places to start are the Modern Finance Leader blog, the ERP-ACE Team blog, the Human Capital Management blog, and the Modern Marketing blog (not to mention this one, The Fusion Insider).
In summary
By actively engaging with these resources, you can use Fusion Applications quarterly updates as a powerful source of innovation and competitive differentiation. For more details on the mechanics of how they work, check out “Quarterly updates made easy.”
Related posts you might like
- A step-by-step plan for adopting Fusion Apps features
- Quarterly updates made easy
- 25D roadmaps—new agents for ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX
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