Merry Christmas

Just wanted to drop a quick note and wish everyone a great holiday season. I certainly hope in 2010 I can find more time to post on our blog but something tells me that with another little one on the way it is going to be tough. With that said, I will continue to try to pass along relevant and meaningful information related to Oracle Business Intelligence. Some of the topics I am looking forward to covering in 2010 are:

• The release of OBIEE version 11G
• The continued integration/fusion of multidimensional and relational components within the Oracle BI framework
• The release of the Hyperion IR to OBIEE migration utility
• Holding out hope for the creation of a Business Objects Universe to OBIEE migration utility

More Info on Upcoming OAUG Connection Point - EPM Conference

The OAUG Connection Point - EPM conference is is a 2 day conference on Feb 23-24 2010 ($495 pre-registration fee). The conference will include approximately 39 Hyperion and Oracle BI presentations. The target audience is the Functional/Business/Finance community but Technical users will have 2 full days of content built in so they can benefit too. This two-day event includes five concurrent tracks, keynote sessions, Certified Partners exhibit areas and multiple networking opportunities.

The 5 Presentation Tracks are:

•Budget, Forecasting and Planning
•Financial Consolidations and Reporting
•Business Intelligence and Analytics
•The Office of the CFO
•EPM Product Roadmap

The track presentations include presentations that cover the various EPM and Oracle BI product stack such as Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Strategic Finance (HSF), OBIEE, ODI, Essbase, Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) and others.

Call for Papers - OAUG Connection Point - EPM

OAUG Connection Point 2010 Call for Papers
For those interested in submitting a paper go to the following link:
http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/survey-intro.zgi?p=WEB229UMSLRFMN

Selected speakers will be awarded one complimentary event registration for the seminar. Please note, all travel and expenses incurred are the obligation of the speaker.

Please note the following paper submission deadlines:

Enterprise Performance Management (New Jersey, USA): 15 December, 2009
Dubai: 15 December, 2009
Budapest: 22 December, 2009

If you have questions please contact myself or James Hobbs, jhobbs@oaug.com.

Kerdock Awarded Oracle Partner Sales Readiness Verification Certification

This week Kerdock was awarded the "Oracle Partner Sales Readiness Verification initiative" certification. As a result, Kerdock is recognized as Oracle's go to partner for BI & EPM in the TOLA Region. We are excited to receive this designation and look forward to continuing to work with the Oracle sales team.
The certification is not just handed to partners as they first have to be nominated by the Oracle Sales Team in your region and then the partner must pass an exam which included providing presentations and demos before a panel of Oracle sales executives.
Here is an Oracle press release that talks more about the program:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018052_EN

Bill Inmon at DOUG Meeting

Attended the DOUG - BI Forum yesterday at the Oracle Las Colinas office. Kerdock was the sponsor and it was a great turn out as one of the leading experts in data warehousing, Bill Inmon, spoke at the event. It was a treat to listen to Bill speak as he talked about the future of data warehousing. One of the main topics he discussed was the business value in capturing non structured data in corporate data warehouses and the next generation ETL tools which can handle various text data. It was a great time and I highly recommend people who are interested in BI and data warehousing that they begin to research these new and exciting topics.

OAUG Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management 2010 Regional Conferences

I am currently on the steering committee for the new OAUG Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management regional conferences that will begin in 2010. In order to start getting the word out I thought I would provide a little preview.

• The conferences will be 2 days
• The conferences will be called: OAUG Connection Point – Enterprise Performance Management” with a tag line of: “Providing excellence in education & training to the Oracle Hyperion and Business Intelligence communities”
• The purpose of these regional conferences is to provide training and education to the business user community with content soley focused on Hyperion and Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE)
• The first conference is scheduled for February 23 & 24 2010 at the Grand Hyatt Jersey City, New Jersey

If you are an Oracle partner that provides offerings around Hyperion and/or OBIEE and want to become a sponsor please contact me asap.

Thoughts on OpenWorld 2009

Have finally caught up after getting back from OpenWorld 2009 and just wanted to post a few thoughts on the conference.

1) OBIEE continues to be a point of emphasis amongst all of the Oracle products. In the key note given by Charles Phillips and Safra Katz, several of the industry verticle product managers i.e. Retail, etc. provided demos that clearly showed OBIEE elements embedded in their applications.

2) At the demo grounds, one of the OBIEE developers walked me through the new OBIEE 11G product and was shown a lot of the new features such as:

• new scorecarding capabilities
• new Adobe visualization capabilities
• ability to create custom aggregates and custom calculations
• new "selector" capabilities and use of "saved selections" (much like old OFA product)
• on-line drill capabilities (similar to Discoverer OLAP)
• enhancements to the UI i.e. look and feel
• ability to create custom right click menus which will allow you to call other apps such as BPEL, Workflow, etc...

3) At the demo grounds I spent some time with the developer of the new Hyperion IR to OBIEE migration utility and in my opinion the product works pretty well. There are obviously some limitations i.e does not create new Interactive Dashboards and does not handle your custom java code from Hyperion IR. Oracle is also looking at developing a similar migration utility that would migrate Business Objects Universes to OBIEE but don't quote me on that.

4) Spoke to a lot of clients who are currently evaluating OBIEE and many are considering going the "buy" route and implementing the BI Apps.

Kerdock OBIEE OpenWold 2009 Presentation

For those of you that will be attending OpenWorld next month, I wanted to let you know that Kerdock has been selected to present. Our presentation will be a case study on our OBIEE implementation at NetApp and we will be providing a demonstration of the solution. So I encourage you to come by and check it out as I think it will be informative. The presentation details are as follows:

Title: NetApp Integrates SABA and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for LMS Dashboards
Track: Enterprise Performance Management/Business Intelligence
Date: 13-OCT-09
Time: 14:30 - 15:30
Venue: Marriott Hotel Room: Salon 10/11

OAUG OBI SIG Webcast - Humana Case Study

Be sure to attend the next OAUG OBI SIG webcast. Details as follows:

Title: Humana Gains Efficiency with Oracle BI & Essbase
Date: Monday, September 28th
Time: Noon CST

Webcast Link: https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/cmn_jm_hub.uix?mID=15771510
Conference Id: 157715103

Dial In Number: 1-866-682-4770
Conference Id: 3679513
Passcode: 0988

OAUG OBI SIG Meeting Oct 11th, 2009 - Agenda

For those of you who are attending OpenWorld this October make sure to attend the OAUG OBI SIG meeting as we are going to have some great discussions around OBIEE. Below is the agenda for the meeting:

OBISIG Meeting AgendaDate: Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Time: 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Pacific Time
Location: Moscone Center West, Room 2014
Admission: Admission is open to ALL attendees of OpenWorld, free ofcharge.

Program:
3:00 – 3:05: Intro – About the OBISIG – OpenWorld BI Events of Interest – OBISIG Board
3:05 – 3:30: Oracle Business Intelligence – Direction & Vision – Joe Thomas, OracleCorp
3:30 – 5:00: Oracle BI Round Table Discussion – Customers, Partners & Oracle Corporation

During the BI Round Table hear the following customers tell their BI Stories and answer questions from the audience : Humana, Epcor, & Black & Decker

Post Twitter updates from delivers

A few days ago I read on a blog a question about posting to Twitter from Delivers via the advanced tab. So I ventured to try this myself and here are my results. It's very cool to be able to send Twitter updates via Delivers since this would essentially leverage Twitter's ability to notify both email and phone devices (iphone/blackberry/etc) with little to no hassle. I'm not going to get into the details on how to build the Java class, but here's how I did it:

I used Twitter4J as my library to log-in and post Twitter updates. I could create my own URL wrappers but why re-invent the lemonade right? so go and grab a copy of Twitter4J from http://yusuke.homeip.net/twitter4j/en/index.html and use your favorite IDE (I used Eclipse) to create your java class.

In order to pass the Twitter username and password I used the parameter values that you can setup in the Advanced tab of the iBot creation wizard. Then I referenced those two parameters within my java class like so:

Twitter twitter = new Twitter(jobInfo.parameter(0),jobInfo.parameter(1));

For the content to post, I used a modified version (removed HTML tags) of the Corporate Overview sample that is included with the Paint dashboard sample (Shared Folders/Paint Demo/Sales Summaries/Regional Analysis/Corporate Overview) which is a narrative view. I modified it and saved it to "My Folders". This is the text that will be posted to Twitter.

I setup the iBot as follows:

• Class Name: com.kerdock.delivers.DeliversToTwitter (the name of my Java class)
• ClassPath: kdqobiee.jar (the name of the jar containing the above class)
• Additional Class Path(s): twitter4j.jar (downloaded from the URL referenced above)
• Results: Pass delivery content to Java Program
• Other Parameters: two parameters containing my twitter username and password

Then I copied the jars (kdqobiee.jar and twitter4j.jar) to the appropriate folder (in my case is C:\OracleBI\web\javahost\lib)

Finally, when I save my iBot, my twitter status is updated with the text from the Answers view:

Migrating Brio/Hyperion IR to OBIEE

First, I will start off with a little bit of Kerdock history. Back in 2002 when Kerdock was founded we started out as a Brio Partner. Since 2002, the BI industry has experienced a lot of consolidation. As a result, Kerdock has realigned itself twice due to the acquisitions by Hyperion and then Oracle. Kerdock today is totally aligned with Oracle and has maintained Certified Advantage Partner status which is the highest partner level offered by Oracle.

As a result of Kerdock's roots, we have worked with many clients over the years who have implemented Brio and/or Hyperion IR to solve their business intelligence needs. More recently we have been engaged in OBIEE implementations and therefore have experience working with all of the OBIEE + tool sets. Today when we meet with our legacy Hyperion clients we are starting to see more interest in OBIEE for the following reasons:

1. They have implemented v 11.x of Hyperion and would like to take advantage of the tighter integration between OBIEE and the Hyperion Workspace
2. They are on an older version of Brio or Hyperion IR and are facing support issues
3. They would like to take advantage of the enterprise framework of OBIEE such as the common information model (OBIEE Repository) to reduce report maintenance
4. They would like to take advantage of he OBIEE web based infrastructure that makes it easy to integrate with other Oracle applications as well as 3rd party applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint and Adobe Flex

So recently I attended an Oracle webcast that discussed a new migration utility that converts Hyperion BQYs to OBIEE Answers Requests and therefore make the move to OBIEE less time consuming and costly. I was pleasantly surprised at the extent of the process as it goes beyond what the Discoverer to OBIEE migration accomplishes.

The Translation workbench will require clients to be on version 9.x of Hyperion and version 10.1.3.x of OBIEE. If you are a client who is pre-system 9 you will have one additional step to migrate your BQY's to a system 9 environment. The workbench will soon be a beta release and clients can work with partners such as Kerdock or Oracle to start migrating their BQYs to Answers. The migration process at a high level involves 5 steps:

1. Import data sources - physical tables, columns
2. Accumulate BQY DM dimensions and extend physical layer
3. Generate standard names, star schemas, and presentation folders
4. Regenerate BI Repository that supports BQY reports
5. Generate Answers request definitions - criteria, pivots, charts

General release of the migration utility will not be out till some time next calendar year so if you are interested in utilizing this utility within the next few months please feel free to contact me. My email address is jim.glazar@kerdock.com

Upcoming OAUG OBI SIG Webcasts

As a Board Member of the OAUG OBI SIG I would like to point out that we have 4 upcoming OBI webcasts in the run up to OpenWorld 2009. You can also view this info on the OBI SIG website at http://obisig.oaug.org/events.php?page=Events

The webcast details are as follows:

1) What's New with Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6?
Monday, August 10th, 10:00 am Pacific, 12:00 Noon Central, 1:00 pm Eastern – 1 Hour DurationSpeaker(s) : Joe Thomas, Oracle Corporation
Abstract : The 7.9.6 release of the Oracle BI Applications was the most significant since the Oracle acquisition of OBI EE and the BI Apps from Siebel. Come learn about new BI Apps such as Oracle Project Analytics and Oracle Loyalty Analytics, along with significant enhancements to other BI Applications such as Oracle HR Analytics or Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics. New integrations to JDE and well as enhanced integrations to EBS and Peoplesoft will also be discussed.Conference DetailsConference Title OBI EE SIG: What's New with Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6Conference ID 152549725Conference KeyDate and Time 10-Aug-2009 10:00 AM PST Duration 1 HourTimezone (-08:00) US Pacific TimeDial-In Number 866.682.4770 (Toll-free) or 408-774-4073 (Toll)https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/cmn_jm_hub.uix?mID=152549725Audio Conference Code: 3679513, then 0988 as the security code

2)Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE) Integration Today & Tomorrow
Monday, August 24th, 10:00 am Pacific, 12:00 Noon Central, 1:00 pm Eastern – 1 Hour DurationSpeaker(s) : Jim Glazar, Kerdock Consulting
Abstract : Learn how to integrate the current version of OBIEE (10.1.3.4) with other Oracle applications as well as 3rd party applications in order to provide pervasive business intelligence throughout your enterprise. We will demonstrate current OBIEE integration points with the following Oracle applications Hyperion Workspace and Hyperion SmartView and discuss future integration plans with Hyperion HFM & Hyperion Planning. Also, we will demonstrate how to integrate OBIEE with 3rd party applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint, Adobe Flex, and Apple iPhone.
Conference Title OBI EE SIG: > Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE) Integration Today & Tomorrow
Conference ID 153230394
Conference Key Date and Time 24-Aug-2009 10:00 AM PST
Duration 1 Hour
Timezone (-08:00) US Pacific Time
Dial-In Number 866.682-4770(Toll-free) or 408-774-4073(Toll)
https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/cmn_jm_hub.uix?mID=153230394

3)Maximizing your Oracle Discoverer investment with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus
Thursday, September 10th, 10:00 am Pacific, 12:00 Noon Central, 1:00 pm Eastern – 1 Hour DurationSpeaker: Jose Villacis, Oracle
Abstract: This session covers migrating from Oracle Discoverer to Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus. Hear how Oracle Discoverer metadata and worksheet concepts correspond to Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus concepts and how to create Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus physical, logical, and presentation layers with Oracle Discoverer info.

4) Fortune 100 Company gains Efficiency with Oracle BI Solutions, Hyperion Solutions and Essbase
Monday, September 28th, 10:00 am Pacific, 12:00 Noon Central, 1:00 pm Eastern – 1 Hour DurationSpeaker(s) : Debbie Kraus, Humana - Todd Randolph, Optimum Solutions
Abstract : Learn how a Fortune 100 healthcare company planned, designed, built, and implemented an improved Incurred Financial Model process, utilizing and integrating Oracle Essbase, OBI EE and Hyperion. This organization leverages monthly operational information to estimate their claims liability, a process consisting of 3 major steps that previously used Microsoft Access Databases to manage, maintain and audit this information. Upon outgrowing this system, the company performed research, due diligence and a proof of concept in search of a new solution. The key considerations for selecting the new solution was the ability to meet current requirements and future growth, improved functionality, performance, scalability, and total cost of ownership.

BI Publisher + Sharepoint Integration

So we had a few questions on how we had achieved integration between BI Publisher and Sharepoint. There are only a few configuration steps you have to take, both in Sharepoint and BI Publisher in order to accomplish this.

First of all you need to enable either Digest or Basic authentication in IIS. Make sure you understand the security issues with each of these, specially if you are not using SSL over the internet.



In the Sharepoint website properties click "Edit" in the "Authentication and access control" section.

Enable Digest, Basic authentication or both. See my warning above about understanding the security risks.

Now go to BI Publisher and setup your Webdav directory:
In BI Publisher admin screen edit the webdav directory adding the host, port (if necessary) and match the Security setting with the selected one in the IIS configuration (basic or digest).

Save your changes.




Select the report you want to schedule and click the “Schedule” button which will display the above screen. Select “Web Folder” in the Delivery section and select your configured SharePoint WebDav directory. Enter your username/password and the path to the file you want to save. Make sure you include the name of the file (in this case I selected Price List.pdf which is the sample Price List report that comes standard with BIP). Once you click submit it will start the job.


When it’s finished it should display “Success” in the Status column like so:



Finally, go to your SharePoint site and the file should be there:

GI Joe BI Campaign - Summer 2009

by Jim Glazar June 9, 2009



Kerdock is launching a GI Joe BI campaign this summer which will include Oracle BI presentations and culminate in a screening of the new GI Joe movie in August. The event will take place in Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta. If you are interested in attending please visit our website at http://www.kerdock.com/ or shoot me an email.

I will post more details about the event as they emerge.

OBI EE Training Classes

by Jim Glazar posted 6-24-2009

I still get asked by clients who are new to OBI EE what Oracle training classes they should take. So I thought I would provide a few suggestions. If you are interested in taking classes provided by Oracle I would recommend the following:

• Oracle BI Suite EE 10g R3: Create Reports & Dashboards - This 3 day class covers the fundamentasls for creating Answers requests and Interactive Dashboards
• Oracle BI Suite EE 10g R3: Build Repositories - This 5 day class covers how to create the three layers of the repository (Physical, Model, & Presentation) utilizing the BI Admin tool

If you are going to do an OBI EE implementation utilizing the BI Apps (Pre-Builts), then I recommend also taking the following class:

• Oracle BI Application 7.9: Develop A Data Warehouse - This 5 day course covers the build of the OBAW data warehouse and the Informatica ETL processes

Since Kerdock Consulting is an Oracle Certified Education Partner we offer these training classes out of our Houston, Tx office. To see our latest class schedule go to our website at http://www.kerdock.com/default.aspx and click on the link that says "Certified Training"

If you would like to take some additional OBI EE courses beyond what is offered by Oracle, I recommend looking at the custom curriculum created by Business Intelligence Consulting Group (BICG). Their website is http://www.biconsultinggroup.com/

OBI EE Integration Points Presentation

by Jim Glazar 6/23/2009

Last Wednesday Pablo Bryan and myself delivered an OBI EE presentation at the Houston HOUG meeting. Our presentation covered the current integration points with OBI EE as well as some future integration points that are coming down the road.

As many of you well know Oracle has been on the path of converging their EPM and BI solutions under one umbrella called Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). This includes the Hyperion applications as well as the analytic applications from Siebel. I think everyone would agree that this is a good thing for clients and end users. However, the key to making this successful is integration between the products.

Our presentation covered the current integration points that exist with OBI EE version 10.1.3.4 which included integration with the iPhone, Microsoft SharePoint, Adobe Flex, Hyperion Workspace, Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion SmartView, and Oracle EBS. Our presentation included a live demonstration of many of these integration points. Future integration points covered included Hyperion HFM & Planning as well as autmated Essbase aggregation and summary maintenance.

If you are interested in obtaining the slide deck for this presentation, feel free to email me at jim.glazar@kerdock.com. Also, if you are interested in seeing these products integrated with OBI EE, feel free to contact me to arrange on an on-site demo or webcast.

Smart View 11.1.X Webinar Today

by Jim Glazar June 5, 2009

Event Details:FridayJune 5, 200912:00 pm - 12:45 pm CST
Phone Dial-In:888-437-3188 or 201-604-5096
Web Log-In:www.infiniteconferencing.comParticipant Code: 4149413

What is Smart View?The Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office provides a common Microsoft Office interface designed specifically for Oracle's Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence. Using Smart View, you can view, import, manipulate, distribute, and share data in Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint interfaces.
What You Will Learn
Integration Points with Planning, Hyperion Financial Management and OBIEE
Smart Slices
Planning Ad Hoc Functionality
Combined Data Display

Join us for this free webinar to learn the benefits of Oracle Hyperion Smart View when integrated with your Microsoft Office Environment.
Featured Speaker Chris Khoury is a Consultant within Kerdock Consulting's Business Intelligence Practice. He has 6+ years experience in Information Technology. He has worked in Software, Oil and Gas, and Telecommunications industries.
About Kerdock Kerdock is more than just a consulting firm, we are an Oracle Certified Advantage Partner, specializing in Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle E-Business Suite with a unique offering of services, training, and licensing.

Back From Collaborate 09

May 8, 2009 by Jim Glazar

So I am back from Collaborate 09 and have to say that overall had a pretty good time. On Sunday we had our OAUG OBI SIG meeting and had a great Build vs. Buy panel discussion. The folks from Humana and Gallup provided a lot of insight into the decisions that went into their OBI EE implementations. Ray Payne who heads the OAUG came by and said that Oracle is looking at possibly sponsoring a conference that would be specific to EPM much like the old Hyperion Solutions conferences. I will post more details as I get more information. I also got a chance to meet several of the OAUG Hyperion SIG Board Members and look forward to working with them more closely as Hyperion EPM and Oracle BI continue to merge under the Oracle EPM umbrella.

On Monday morning I attended the key note speech given by Charles Phillips. One of the key announcements that relates to Oracle BI was the rollout of BI Apps version 7.9.6. One of the key additions is the inclusion of Project Analytics. Another announcement was the enhancements to their Beehive product which includes new collaboration functionality to compete with the Microsoft suite of tools such as SharePoint. Oracle is touting the integration of this product in comparison to Microsoft's disjointed applications. Charles also went on to highlight Oracle's accomplishments this year and this list was pretty extensive.

The participant estimates for the conference was around 4500 so not too bad considering the current economy. It was a great opportunity to network and forge new partnerships and I look forward to Collaborate 2010 which will be at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas.

OAUG OBI SIG Meeting Agenda

May 1, 2009 by Jim Glazar

As a Board Member on the OAUG OBI SIG I highly recommend that those of you who will be at Collaborate on Sunday May 3rd attend the OBI SIG meeting as there will be some great discussions on OBI EE. The agenda for the meeting is below.

Join us at Collaborate 2009
Sunday May 3, 2009
1:00-3:15PM

Here is the Agenda:
1:00 pm – 1:15 pm - Introductions

1:15 pm – 2:00 pm - Oracle Business Intelligence – Direction & Vision
Alan Lee, Director,Product Management, Oracle BI Product Management Team will speak to current and future state of Oracle’s BI solution. Mr. Lee is currently leading Essbase Product Management. He has over 12 years of experience in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing and has been working with Oracle Business Intelligence for over 5 years.

2:00 pm – 2:45 pm - Point - CounterPoint - "Buy vs. Build"
"Do I Buy or Build my Business Intelligence Solutions?"
Hear experts from Humana and Gallup discuss the different approaches their organizations took in creating their BI solution and answer questions from the audience.

2:45 pm – 3:15 pm - BI RoundTable Discussion – Ask the Experts A panel of BI experts from Oracle Corporation, including Shad Syfert, Alan Lee, Michael Schrader, Gayl Czaplicki from Oracle Corporation, Gallup, Humana and the OBI SIG Board will take any and all questions from the audience.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Oracle Hyperion SmartView - New Features in 11.1.2 (Fusion Edition)

April 29, 2009 by Chris Khoury

New Features in the Fusion Edition Include:

1. Data Source Manager: Replaces Connection Manager. A dock-able pane which allows us to switch between the three interfaces: the Common Provider Connections, the Independent Provider Connections, and the Simulation & Forecasting Workbooks Connections.

2. Common Provider Connections (PROVIDED CONNECTIONS PREVIOUSLY ONLY BETWEEN SMART VIEW AND ESSBASE): Where we can manage connections our connections to Essbase, Planning, and OBIEE. The connections go through Hyperion Provider Services. Smart Slices of these data sources are created, stored, and accessed through this interface of the new Data Source Manager.

3. Independent Provider Connections: Is comparable to the previous Connection Manager. In it, we can manage connections to Hyperion Reporting and Analysis and HFM. We can use the Independent Provider Connections to connect to Planning, but we will be able to only use the functionality available in release 9.3.1.

4. Simulating & Forecasting Workbooks: If the user is licensed to use Crystal Ball, they can access and work with Oracle Crystal Ball through this interface.

5. Smart Slices: Is a reusable perspective (extract) of an Essbase, Planning, or OBIEE data source. It is composed of a single member, a combination if single members, filters, or combination of single members and filters. These components limit the users to the data they can work with (boundaries). There is no limit on how many Smart Slices can be created. For example; Smart Slices can be created for different sales geographical regions, different product lines. Smart Slices are created by Administrators and are stored in the Provider Services layer. Access to Smart Slices is assigned to the users by the Admins.

6. Report Designer: Reports writers can use this interface to manager reports based on Smart Slices. A report can be displayed as a Grid, Table, or a Chart. Report Designer works with Essbase, Planning, and OBIEE.

7. Essbase Enhanced Drill-Through Capabilities: using Essbase Studio.

8. Planning Ad Hoc Functionality: In previous Smart View versions, we were able to use the Ad Hoc Functionality only in Essbase connections. In this release, we can use Ad Hoc in Planning as well. We are able to Zoom In/Out, and Pivot. Ad Hoc Functionality in Planning is a part of the Web Forms Design (defined in Web Form Design).

9. Planning à Web Launch: Planning Web Forms can be launched directly into a Smart View Excel Sheet.

10. HFM Adding Members to Data Forms: If this feature is enabled by Administrators, user can insert additional members and enter and save data.

11. HFM Linked Forms: When Administrators create Data Forms, they can define links from one form to another to enable drill-through to a more specific data entry point. For example; a form that includes Account Summary Data, can be linked to another form which provides more details.

12. HFM --> Changing Database Passwords: We can change the Data Source Passwords for HFM directly from Independent Provider Connections.

13. Accessibility: Supporting Documentation accessible to the Disabled Community.

14. Installation and Configuration: Smart View can be installed by running the Executable File for Essbase. It is also available as a Standalone Executable file.

Oracle Hyperion SmartView Overview

April 29, 2009 by Chris Khoury

The Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office (Smart View) is a component of Hyperion Foundation Services. Smart View provides a common Microsoft Office interface designed specifically for Oracle's Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI). Using Smart View, you can view, import, manipulate, distribute and share data in Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint interfaces. It is a comprehensive tool for accessing and integrating EPM and BI content from Microsoft Office products.

Ad Hoc -or- Free Form Analysis

This is for Users requiring an environment to have a conversation with the data. Typically they use the Excel environment to interactively investigate the data contained in the source(s). They may start with templates that begin the process (such as East->Cola->Sales) or a blank sheet where they begin shaping and altering the grids of data as they use the exposed functionality. Typically users go after the data from Oracle EPM sources such as Essbase, Planning or Financial Management using clicks & drag drop for the most part. Other data sources supported for ad hoc analysis includes Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

Predefined Form Interaction

EPM application users that execute predefined input/reporting forms find Smart View a convenient way of completing tasks within the Office environment. These would be planners, consolidators and the like that have a desire to work in the excel environment either for consistent experience compared to the web application or to tie other spreadsheet-based models into their process. For example, Pepsi Bottling uses Smart View for Planning in order to incorporate data still housed in spreadsheet and workbook-based models.

Report Design

Reporting is another dimension of Smart View usage which leverages the capabilities of EPM data retrieves. Once the data is available within Office we can create reports as needed based on a combination of data sources. For example Planning & Financial Management data could be used to compare actual to budget. Reports could be made more complex by providing the ability to compare multiple scenarios, for different periods etc. The power of office can be used to create Reports in the Office environment and can be refreshed periodically as needed.

Smart View Key Capabilities

- Ability to integrate EPM & BI data directly from the data source into Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Outlook

- Full ad-hoc and free form analysis capabilities for Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Planning and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition

- Data access from Relational or Multi-Dimensional sources

- An alternative, Office-based interface for leveraging Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, and Hyperion Workforce Planning data entry forms

- Ability to create data perspectives for end users called Smart Slices

- Ability to execute Hyperion reporting jobs from within Office applications

- Ability to dynamically refresh Hyperion data across Office documents with a single click

- Ability to perform selective, multi-page import of documents residing in a Workspace repository into Office documents, including reports created in Financial Reporting, Interactive Reporting, SQR and Web Analysis.

- Point of View (POV) search for efficient,context-based searching

- Support for highly formatted grids in Microsoft Excel

- Support for Hyperion Essbase Visual Explorer (included in the Smart View plug-in) delivering one-click visualizations, bi-directional communication, and linked data views

- Report Creation in Excel, Word and PowerPoint using EPM and BI data

- Comprehensive VBA toolkit for developing custom Office-based analytic interfaces

SSL Enable Your OBIEE / BI Publisher Installation

April 21, 2009 by Pablo Bryan

I recently had the need of exposing an OBIEE implementation out to the internet. As I finished the installation, I realized that the login prompt and other components are passed as plain text openly through the wire. So the need came up to secure this installation with SSL. SSL will encrypt with a private/public key all the communication between the server and the browser.

In order to SSL enable OBIEE there are several components that you need to modify, but first you need to generate a server certificate and have it signed by a trusted certificate authority. If you don’t want to pay the $200 or so you can self sign the certificate, but you will get the annoying warning messages in the browser. I got a free 90 day signed certificate from instantssl.com. Before we get started, I would recommend that you backup all the configuration files you are going to modify in case something goes wrong you can always go back to the saved versions.

The first step is to generate a keystore with keytool like so:

keytool -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias myserver_mycompany_com -keystore myserver_mycompany_com.key -storepass password -dname "CN=myserver.myhost.com, OU=MyCompanyDept, O=MyCompany, L=Irving, ST=Texas, C=US"

This will generate a file called myserver_mycompany_com.key that is the keystore where your key lives. I saved this file in a secure place with restricted access where only Administrators (or root for linux/unix systems) have access. In my case I saved it to /root/ssl/ The alias is important as you will use it to import the signed chain from the Trusted CA.

Make sure you specify the fully qualified name of your server as the CN (i.e. obiee.mycompany.com) especially if you are going to have the certificate signed by a trusted CA.

If you are going to self sign the certificate, run the following:

keytool -selfcert -alias myserver_mycompany_com -keystore myserver_mycompany_com.key –storepass password

If you are going to get a Trusted CA to sign your certificate, run the following:

keytool -certreq -alias myserver_mycompany_com –keystore myserver_mycompany_com.key -file myserver_mycompany_com.cert

This will generate a file called myserver_mycompany_com.cert which you need to use when getting your certificate from a trusted CA. I used instantssl.com. Use the content of this file to request your signed certificate (it's free for 90 days).

If you are using a self signed certificate, all you need to do is export the certificate from your key and import it into the SA (OBIEE) and JAVA certificte store like so:

keytool -export -alias myserver_mycompany_com -keystore keystore.ssl -file myserver_mycompany_com.cert

And to import the file:

keytool -import -alias myserver_mycompany_com -file myserver_mycompany_com.cert -keystore JRE_HOME/lib/security/cacerts

for Java, and:

keytool -import -file chapulin.cert -keystore OracleBIData_HOME/web/config/certificates/saw.keystore

For the OBIEE keystore. The default password for the OBIEE certificate store is "password". Of course you need to replace the values JRE_HOME and OracleBIData_HOME with actual values from your installation. What this does is enable the signed certificate to be trusted by the OBIEE installation and any programs using JAVA in this server.

Once you have added your certificate files to the keystores, you need to update the OC4J configuration of your OBIEE server. The files to edit are as follows:

Edit the file OracleBIHOME/oc4j_bi/j2ee/home/config/default-web-site.xml

The first tag should be the web-site tag you need to add the secure="true" attribute like so:

<web-site ... port="443" display-name="OC4J 10g (10.1.3) Default Web Site" schema-major-version="10" secure="true" schema-minor-version="0" >

Also note that I changed the port from the default 9704 to 443. I did this since some firewalls block odd ports like 9704 and I needed to access this box from anywhere even behind firewalls and most firewalls open up the standard SSL port of 443.

Next, you need to add a tag with the following info:

<ssl-config keystore="PATH_TO_KEYSTORE/myserver_mycompany_com.key" keystore-password="password" />

Where PATH_TO_KEYSTORE points to the folder where you saved the keystore that we generated on the first step above, and the password matches the password you've been using in all the "keytool" steps.

We're almost done, but not quite there yet. In order to fully utilize SSL we need to update the BI Publisher config file to use SSL as well. We already added the certificate to the keystore. Now we need to update the pointers in the config files.

First we need to update OracleBIData_HOME/web/config/instanceconfig.xml file. Look for the following entries and update the protocol from "http" to "https" and update the port, in my case from "9704" to "443" like so:

<ServerURL>https://myserver.mycompany.com:443/xmlpserver/services/XMLPService</ServerURL>
<WebURL>https://myserver.mycompany.com:443/xmlpserver

And finally, we need to update the BI Publisher's xml config file. You can also do this via the web, but I found it much easier to do it all at the command line while I'm updating all the other configuration files.

OracleBI_HOME/xml/XML/Admin/Configuration/xmlp-server-config.xml

You need to look for the tags:

<property name="SAW_PROTOCOL" value="https"/>
<property name="SAW_PORT" value="443"/>

And update their values to the values you are using.

After all of these changes, restart all services including oc4j and you should be able to have OBIEE SSL enabled with BI Publisher.

OAUG BI SIG Events at Collaborate '09

April 20, 2009 by Jim Glazar

Collaborate '09 is quickly approaching and is scheduled for May 3rd - 7th in Orlando, Florida. Those of you who are going to be there on Sunday, May 3rd I highly encourage you to attend the BI and Hyperion SIG meetings.

1) OAUG BI SIG Meeting - 1pm - 3:15 pm
2) OAUG Hyperion SIG Meeting - 3:30 - 5:45 pm

As a Board Member on the OAUG BI SIG, I know that we have some great things planned for our BI SIG Meeting including a Build vs. Buy panel discussion with OBI EE professionals from both Humana and Gallup who have recently implemented OBI EE.

On Sunday night after the SIG Meetings the BI and Hyperion SIGs are going to co-sponsor a fun event at BB Kings from 6:30 - 8:30 pm. This will be a chance for people to network with other Hyperion and BI colleagues and to catch up with old friends.

For more details go to the OAUG BI SIG website: http://obisig.oaug.org/

Hope to see you at Collaborate '09 and feel free to come by and say hi to us at the Kerdock Consulting booth.

OBI EE Gurus Initial Post

April 17, 2009 by Jim Glazar

Welcome to the new OBI EE Gurus Blog. The main intent of this blog is to provide our readers with content covering all things to do with OBI EE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition).

Our goal is to provide timely and accurate information and include content such as:

• Tips & Tricks
• Integration Points (especially with the Hyperion applications)
• New Features
• Strategic & Roadmap Information

A little info about myself:

I am the Director of the BI Practice at Kerdock Consulting which is a Certified Advantage Partner with Oracle. I started working with Oracle EPM and BI applications back in 1996 so over 12 years ago - boy has time flown by. With the acquisitions of Hyperion and Siebel, Oracle really for its first time has a comprehensive and top tier BI & EPM offering. So for me, I find this to be an exciting time in this space and look forward to continuing to work with the Oracle suite of applications and witnessing their continued integration.

About the team of OBI EE Gurus:

Kerdock Consulting has a strong group of OBI EE technical resources and in fact many of them are certified Oracle Instructors. So we have a strong team of resources that will be posting their OBI EE knowledge on this blog. Furthermore, our firm also specializes in Hyperion so our resources also have extensive experience with the Hyperion applications so they are knowledgeable on OBI EE and Hyperion integration points.

In conclusion, I hope now that you have found our blog that you find it informative and useful and don't forget to tell your friends and colleagues.