Tuesday 24 June 2008

BI Publisher and my favourite moan



Oracle ACE Director Eric Marcoux (note the ACE beads around his neck) gave a presentation at ODTUG on BI Publisher as an enterprise solution. It was an excellent presentation that compared the embedded BI Publisher which is free with the applications to the full version. What he noted was his two PeopleSoft instances are at different versions of BI publisher from each other and the stand alone version is higher. This is my favourite moan, please, please Oracle reduce the time between great technology being available, and it being available to your apps users.

But back to Eric’s presentation, I pointed out that the embedded BI Publisher is a restricted use licence and cannot be used on any bespoke. Mike Donahue the product manager corrected me and said that was only true in the case of EBS, not sure that is fair either.

But for reporting this tool is fantastic, it is probably one of the oldest fusion tools and started its life as XML Publisher in EBS. The product manager there Tim Dexter is really passionate about BI Publisher and his blog is well worth a read.

Within Fujitsu we have a lot of historic data around invoices and purchase orders from when we had many different business units all using different stationary, now when we run a report to produce a duplicate document, not only can it say duplicate across it, but the BI Publisher template can determine the logo and style from the org-id and date.

Oh and another moan, who comes up with names in Oracle? XML Publisher, no sorry BI Publisher will be called.........guess...........
Fusion Publisher in the next release

I am an Orcale ACE for my work with Fusion and I'm not knocking the concept or the product just the name

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

OK Ace! (Im jealous)

To your first moan - all the different flavors are on separate development tracks. That said we (core BIP dev) support the standalone release and the EBS release - a conflict of interest in my opinion but I'll shut up on that. So, its kinda up to the implementing team to release the latest and greatest code - Im simplifing the 'politicking' a bit but in an ideal world thats the case.
To your second moan - 'Fusion Publisher'? I hope not - we were after just 'Oracle Publisher' but first the scary 'XML' prefix came then the slightly more friendly 'BI'.
See ya in September I hope and an all expenses trip to ol'Blighty in Dec for UKOUG would be nice :0)
Tim