Personalizing the Springboard and Navigator for a Smooth Redwood Transition

Redwood is the best thing to happen to the Oracle Fusion home page in years. Cleaner screens, smarter layouts, less clutter. And Oracle is rolling it out the sensible way, one release at a time, behind opt ins, so every customer sets its own pace. That patience is a gift to implementation teams. It also creates a strange in between period where the new Redwood pages and the old classic ones both show up on the same home page, side by side.

That overlap is where a tidy springboard earns its money.

A few minutes in one tool lets a customer decide exactly what each person sees. Hide what a team has outgrown. Keep what a team still leans on. Add shortcuts to reports and links that were never there before. Clients ask for this constantly, and it is one of the fastest wins in any Redwood rollout.

Who feels this first

Most Fusion customers pass knowledge along in two hops. Consultants train the SMEs, the functional key users who know the business cold. Those SMEs then carry the new Redwood pages out to everyone else. That handoff works far better when the home page matches the lesson. Regular business users want one obvious path per task. SMEs often need the older pages a while longer, for comparison and for propping up that first wave of questions. One configuration screen serves both groups at once.

What Redwood shifts on the home page

Two things arrive together. Redwood versions of pages switch on as their profile options and opt ins get enabled. And navigation gets smarter through consolidation. Purchasing is the headline example. The Redwood Purchasing landing page pulls purchase orders, purchase agreements, and negotiations into a single modern entry point, tasks and metrics together in one view. Plenty of businesses love the consolidation. Others have buyers who reached for three separate icons for years and want them right back. Oracle supports either call.

The tool: Structure

Structure controls what shows up on the Navigator, the menu behind the hamburger icon, and on the springboard, the grid of icons on the home page. Worth separating two ideas before starting. Profile options and opt ins decide which version of a page opens. Structure decides what a person can see and click. Together they shape the whole journey.

Every change happens inside a sandbox, so nothing touches real users until it is published.

Setting it up

Start in Setup and Maintenance. Open Sandboxes, create one, name it something obvious like REDWOOD_NAV_JUL2026, tick Structure in the tools list, then Create and Enter. A sandbox banner appears across the top of the page. From the Tools menu on that banner, pick Structure. The Navigation Configuration page opens and lists every group and page entry behind the Navigator and springboard. This one screen is the master switchboard.

Retiring a page a team has moved past is the obvious first job. Click the entry name to edit it. Two settings do the heavy lifting: Show on Navigator handles the main menu, Show on Springboard handles the home page icon. Set both to No, save, and the entry vanishes for everyone once the sandbox publishes. Remember one rule here or it will bite you. An item cannot live on the springboard alone. Hide it from the Navigator and it disappears from the springboard automatically.

Now the smarter move. Ripping the old pages away from everyone on day one rarely goes well. SMEs usually need them a little longer. So instead of a flat No, choose EL Expression and keep an entry visible to specific roles only. Something like this does it:

#{securityContext.userInRole['ORA_FND_APPLICATION_ADMINISTRATOR_JOB']}

Business users get a clean, focused menu from the first day. The SME group keeps its safety net. When the rollout settles, the expression becomes a plain No. Type the role name carefully. Misspell it and the expression quietly reads as false, hiding the entry from absolutely everyone.

For clients who want purchase orders, purchase agreements, and negotiations back as their own icons next to the consolidated landing page, the same screen delivers. From the Create menu, pick Create Page Entry, give it a name, an icon, and a group, and point it at the right application page. Familiar shortcuts return, and the new landing page keeps doing its job beside them.

Then test everything inside the sandbox as a normal user would, and publish from the banner when it reads clean. The change is instant for everyone on their next page load.

Field notes

A few things learned the hard way. Revisit this after every quarterly update, because each release drops new Redwood pages and can reopen the duplicate page problem. Keep a simple sheet of every entry hidden, added, or restricted, with the expression used. The question "where did that icon go" always shows up eventually, and a sheet answers it in seconds. And time the publish to the SME schedule, so the menu people see always matches the material they were just shown.

A home page with one clear path per task is the cheapest adoption project a team will ever run. Redwood finally handed everyone a reason to do it.

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