Harnessing the Power

of BI Publisher
January 17, 2008

Presented By : Sreen Munukutla

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 Presenter
Venkat Munukutla
• Over 12 years of experience in Oracle and Technology.
• Worked in various technical, functional and management roles involving
ERP and technology solutions
• MS from University of Texas, Dallas
• Currently Working for Somasoft as a Senior Consultant for Oracle ERP
and Technologies practice; A complete IT solutions provider

Sreen Munukutla
• BS with MBA (Finance, Systems) from Indian Institute of Management,
Calcutta
• Worked at KPMG (now Bearing Point) in their Enterprise solutions
practice in 90s.
• Over 20 years of experience in Oracle and Technology.
• Worked in various technical, functional and management roles in more
than 30 projects involving ERP and technology solutions (Extensive use
of SOA and Oracle Fusion technologies).
• Currently head of Oracle ERP and Technologies practice at Somasoft
(www.somasoftsol.com), a complete IT solutions provider.

Copyright© 2003 Somasoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 Somasoft’s Service portfolio
• Enterprise Applications – Oracle, Peoplesoft, Siebel, JDE
– Implementation and upgrades etc.
• Managed Support (On-site and Off-shore)
– Functional
– Technical
– DBA
• BI and Analytics
– Oracle/Siebel BI
– Enterprise Data Warehouse
– EPM
• SOA and Middleware
– SOA, Identity Mgmt, BPEL
– Integration – Oracle Fusion, EDI, EAI, Web Services
– Java, J2EE, Oracle
• Training and Documentation

Copyright© 2003 Somasoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 Objectives of the Presentation

• What is BI Publisher

• Understand the features of BI Publisher

• Get to know different components

• Now and Future of the product

• Demo a few features on Template builder

Copyright© 2003 Somasoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 Agenda

• Why Choose BI Publisher

• BI Publisher Components
• BI Publisher Enhancements
• BI Publisher for 11i Customers
• 11i – R12 Reports Conversion Process
• Advanced Features of BI Publisher in R12
• Implementing New Features – Technical Perspective
• Applications
• Question and Answer Session

Copyright© 2003 Somasoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 What is BI Publisher

• Oracle BI Publisher was formerly XML Publisher with new

enhancements and advanced features for reporting

• A great reporting tool inside the eBusiness Suite used for

enhanced reporting functionality to their users

• Tool of choice for eBusiness Suite (EBS) customers

• An estimated 80% of the reports for eBusiness Suite R12 are BI

Publisher based

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 BI Publisher Components

• Data and Layout Abstraction

• Powerful Layout Editing Features

• Super Extracts with Related Information

• Enhanced Reporting Options

• Delivery Manager – email / fax any thing.

• Additional Templates

Copyright© 2003 Somasoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 Architecture

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 Benefits for migrating to R12 for an 11i customer

• One of the carrots to come in R12 is better reporting and an

increased number of templates available for use
• Oracle’s tentative plans include building a Template Bank on
Metalink to allow downloads of development, delivery ready
templates
• Consistent user interface
• Report in multiple formats
• Language and locale options
• Multiple delivery channels

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Different Sources – Output – Multiple Destinations

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Different Output Formats

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 Migrating Reports from 11i – R12

• Custom Reports: R12 has a set of

libraries that will assist in moving custom
reports to a data template and a layout
template

• The libraries are being used internally to

convert the canned reports

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 Converting Reports from Oracle Reports to Oracle
BI Publisher

• Oracle BI Publisher provides a utility for converting reports from

Standard Oracle Reports to Oracle BI Publisher.

• Report Definition and Layout Templates

In Oracle Reports, the data model (SQL query or extraction logic)
and layout are contained in a single file. In Oracle BI Publisher
the data model and the layout are separate objects.

• The conversion utility generates several files which include a

report definition file and a layout template file which are uploaded
to the Oracle BI Publisher repository.
E.g.: PL/SQL specification and body containing the data for
the report.

Copyright© 2003 Somasoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 Conversion Process

The overall flow for the conversion process is as follows:

• Run the conversion utility BIPBatchConversion to migrate reports

from Oracle Reports to BI Publisher.
• Load the PL/SQL package into the database
• Upload the report to the Oracle BI Publisher repository
• Test the report and check the conversion log files to identify any
manual modifications needed to complete the conversion
• Output Files Includes:
– Report definition file With Data Model (for example: REPORT.xdo)
– DataTemplate (for example: REPORT_template.xml)
– Default PL/SQL packages RTF Layout Template (for example:
REPORT.rtf)
– Log file (for example: REPORT.log)

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 BI Publisher is here to stay – Release 12

• 870 templates currently available for R12 for more than 60

modules with
– 2000 templates expected to be available in future releases
– 450 templates will be translated for customers in future releases

• Used across entire division from Financials to SCM to CRM

E.g.:
• HRMS uses government form to a high degree
• Payments team uses XMLP for all payments
• Financial Applications consolidates many reports
• R12.x project to move remaining reports across

Copyright© 2003 Somasoft, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 Enhanced Features for BI Publisher

• Data Extraction Engine

• Bursting Engine

• Consolidated Document Publishing

• Template Enhancements
– Loops
– Conditional Formatting
– Format Triggers

• Delivery Manager: Distributed Delivery

• Template Manager

• Integration

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 R12 Oracle BI Publisher PowerPoint Output

• Oracle BI Publisher 10.1.3.3 adds support for PowerPoint output.

This enables you to get report data into your key business
presentations.

• In this initial version of this functionality, the PowerPoint document

generated is a simple export of the formatted data and charts to
PowerPoint.

• In a future release, there will be more sophisticated integration that

allows for direct embedding and refreshing from within PowerPoint.

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 Other New Features

• Support for Digital Signatures in PDF Documents

• Support for PostScript Printers

• Oracle BI Publisher Web Services

• Advanced Bar Code formatting possible

• Advanced design options: supports use of xsl and xsl:fo elements

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 Integration with Oracle BI Discoverer

• In this release BI Publisher accepts Discoverer worksheets as

report data sources. To facilitate building reports from the
Discoverer worksheets, the Template Builder enables you to
connect to Discoverer, browse worksheets, and load data to the
Template Builder directly from Discoverer.

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 Editing Fields on Templates

• Edit code in the form fields in a single window in the BI Publisher

Properties dialog.
• Template Builder generates the code for you !!

Sample Additional Dialogs simplifying insertion and editing :

• Data field Properties
• Repeating Groups
• Conditional Formatting
• Conditional Regions

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 Flash Templates for Oracle BI Publisher

• Appying Adobe FLEX Templates

This new feature enables report authors to develop Adobe FLEX
templates to generate highly interactive Flash output documents.

In this release,
FLEX : Oracle BI Publisher offers support for Adobe
Corporation's new document format for building interactive forms
and reports, called Flex for Building, Testing and Deploying to
generate Flash output.

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 Sample Applications for BI

• Oracle Financials
• Oracle Payments
• Any custom application

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 Oracle Financials

Business Requirements

•Generate High Fidelity Output

•Allow end user customization
•10000+ page output
•No change for report consumers

Implementation

•RTF Templates
•Scalable transformation
•Concurrent Manager Integration

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 Oracle Payments

Business Requirements

• Generate Electronic Funds Transfer files

• Support 160 formats Very large input data Deliver via FTP,
HTTP

Implementation

• eText Templates
• Delivery Manager

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 Limitations

• Security: The security is only to the extent of role. Would have been great if
report component level is permitted

• Product Maturity: Functionality Compared to Oracle Reports

• Data Model Knowledge: Currently doesn't provide anything like the End User
Layer (EUL) meta-data like Oracle Discoverer for End-users.

• Robustness: Product is not Robust yet with the Number of Product versions and
Releases

• Versions and Features: Oracle XML Publisher version 5.0 has the feature list
relatively small compared to the latest releases.
• File size: Character Based Vs High Fidelity Object Reports
• Totals and Page Numbering: Additional features like Page Totals can be done
only in pdf formatted reports for now
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 Roles Based Security

The security in BIP is based on roles assigned to the user.

The roles available are:
– BI Developer
– BI administrator
– Excel Analyzer
– On Line Analyzer
– BIP reports scheduler

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 Q&A
My contact information:

sreen@somasoftsol.com

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