Floyd Teter, the Senior Director for Oracle Cloud HCM Development, presented a comprehensive presentation focused on explaining to a diverse audience what Redwood is and how to get to Redwood.

What is Redwood?

There has been some confusion among some people about what Redwood is. Yet, despite the sense by some that it is hard to understand or complex, Teter offers a clear explanation of what Redwood is designed to do. He explains, “Redwood builds a user experience that allows you to continuously improve through data insights.”

Getting to Redwood

One important thing for employees and customers to know about Redwood is that because of the work it entails it is being rolled out in a phased and incremental way. The presentation offers a detailed timeline for the cycle of services with key features and their roll-out dates highlighted.

One of the key releases is 25B. In this version, all employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS) will have migrated to Redwood. Even though 25B will include significant advances compared to earlier Redwood versions, there are still pages, such as the HR and admin ones, that will not be included.

25B is not the only key release date that users should be focused on. There are other important accelerated adoption points. For example, in 24B, Responsive UX will become customer unsupported as customers move toward mandatory Redwood Learning self-service. Similarly, in 24D, journeys will replace checklists and onboarding.

Even if the features you are using are not directly impacted by a specific roll-out, Teter encourages users to pick up as much of Redwood as soon as you can to ensure user experience consistency across pages.

Redwood: Two distinct camps

Redwood and its features can be divided into two broad camps:

• Redwood-only capabilities. These features are natively built using Oracle Jet. Examples of this include benefits calculators and touch points.
• Capabilities that can be reimagined with Redwood. These are features and applications that will move from Responsive UX to Redwood. Examples of these migrated capabilities include performance review and succession management.

A slice of Redwood

A brief Q & A at the beginning of the presentation highlighted that many people in the audience had had little or no exposure to Redwood in the real world. To address this knowledge gap, Teter showed participants what Redwood looks like for Natalie, a sales rep in the company.

Teter highlighted the rebranded employee activity center, and he also showed the journey of growing your career. This path has sequential steps that show people how to get from where they are to where they would like to be, such as by getting input from their manager or by expanding their network.

Prep work for Redwood: Laying the foundation

Not surprisingly, given the size and scope of Redwood, Teter notes that it is important to lay the foundation and do extensive prep work. There are three key areas of prep work:

• Inventory your assets.
• Check your security privileges for custom roles
• Enable Oracle Search.

Inventory your assets

It is essential to inventory your assets because in Redwood page composer and transaction design studio are replaced by Visual Builder Studio Express Business Studios. This transition is designed to upgrade data quality and streamline HR processes and avoid many of the hiccups that users found themselves encountering in page composer and transaction design studio.

When users are inventorying their assets, they need to focus on their page personalizations. This includes asking why they set up their page personalization the way they did and see if they want to carry that forward to Redwood. The inventory process should also include checking your URLs and links.

To help with the inventory process, Redwood has the Redwood Personalization Helper Tool which shows which of your personalizations are supported in Redwood. This tool boosts your ability to boost your inventory and also helps you migrate your personalizations. New versions of this tool will be introduced each quarter.

Check your security privileges for custom roles

It is essential, according to Teter, to check your security privileges for custom roles. Not everything may migrate perfectly, and this means that you may need new security privileges for Redwood. One important thing that users can do is check the HCM Security Reference at each new Redwood release.

Enable Oracle Search

Enabling Oracle Search is a critical step for all newly provisioned pods since many Redwood pages are only functional via Oracle Search. There are numerous steps involved in this process, including enabling Oracle Search Profile Options and ingesting indices.

By following these prerequisites carefully, Teter estimates that users will be able to solve 80 percent of their technical challenges without needing expert assistance.

Successfully adopt Redwood

Once you have carefully put in place all of the Redwood prerequisites, you can move forward with adopting Redwood. This process will have three stages:

• Enable administrator profile values by setting your profile value to Y. This step will show you what Redwood pages are available, as well as which ones will be available within the next 60 days.
• Migrate personalizations. In version 24A, many products are already supported for migration. Teter highlighted a list of the supported products, as well as ones that will be supported in the short- and medium-term.
• Complete branding. Teter emphasizes that the current environment is a co-branding one in which there are strict limits to ensure consistency between Redwood and Responsive UX. In this co-branding environment, users can only modify the logo and the cover image. More changes, such as the navigation icons, can be accomplished if you go to the custom theme.

In conclusion

One of the most important tips that Teter offered was to try apps and features built natively in Redwood. Although the goal is to fully transition to Redwood by 25B, it is important to move through this transition at a pace that makes sense for you. And, this may vary from user to user.

Teter went on to add that there is no one right way to transition to Redwood. Instead, there are multiple approaches, such as focusing on the complexity of personalization or potential business impact, that users can consider based on their own situation and needs.

For more information about Redwood, check out our Redwood Content Center, Redwood Demo Center, or the Cloud-Redwood User Group!