Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Can We Have BI Publisher Integration for Our Siebel Version without Major Upgrade?

Some of our customers were asking if they needed to upgrade to Siebel R8.1.1.x version from the older release such as 8.0.x, 7.8.x, 7.7.x, to get the new Siebel Reporting with BI Publisher. The short answers is No. You can stay with your older release.

Having worked with many customers projects, I know how tough and can be a long process to upgrade the whole system especially with this type of CRM application. However, the Actuate support through Oracle is expiring so immediate migration to BI Publisher is required.

So now, we have released the BI Publisher integration as part of the Siebel Fix Pack for the older release of Siebel application to provide the same reporting functionality with BI Publisher that is provided in the Siebel R8.1.1.x.

Now you can start enjoying all the functionalities that come with the BI Publisher integration by just applying the Fix Pack listed below.

Here is the list of the Fix Packs that contains the BI Publisher integration.

Release Release Date Functionality
8.0.0.8 Fix Pack 30th September, 2009 Same as 8.1.1.1 Fix Pack functionality
7.8.2.14 Fix Pack 16th October, 2009 Same as 8.1.1.1 Fix Pack functionality
7.7.2.13 Fix Pack 23rd November, 2009 Same as 8.1.1.1 Fix Pack functionality

The latest Siebel Reporting with BI Publisher is 8.1.1.1, which added some new features like, Parameterized reporting, Scheduling. You should be able to find the Fix Pack from the metalink.

Again, the Actuate support through the Oracle support contract is expiring so I’d strongly recommend to upgrade to the version above by applying the corresponding Fix Pack so that you can start migrating the existing Actuate based reports to BI Publisher based reports

All the out-of-box reports have already migrated to BI Publisher based reports and available within the Siebel application. So you need to do the migration only for the reports you have customized or developed from scratch.

I have talked about how to migrate the existing reports at the following two posts if you are interested in.

If you are interested in discussing how to start planning for the migration, best practice approach, outsourcing service, etc, we have many experience and resources in our Oracle BI Publisher consulting group to assist. Please feel free to contact me at kanichiro.nishida@oracle.com.

14 comments:

  1. Hi,

    Can you please throw some light on the parameterized reporting in BIpublisher integrated with Siebel? Can this be possible in disconnected mode? Appreciate if you can publish a Blog on this.

    Thanks
    B P

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  2. Yes, you can use the parameterized reports on both web client and mobile client (disconnected mode). I'm planning to talk about this topic so stay tuned !

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  3. Hi, i didn't find 7.7.2.13 in oracle metalink, so just installed 7.7.2.12 (the latest Fix Patch). But in my dedicated web client i can not find the BI Publisher function.

    Many thanks, Ming

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  4. Hello,
    Something is not clear to me yet... So I need at least patch 8.0.0.8 to use the BI Publisher reports ? or it is just because of the new functionality (parameterized reports, etc) ?
    In other words... If I have 8.0.0.2 can I use BI PUblisher reports (conversion) without the new functionalities ?
    Txs. a lot
    Antonio

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  5. Yes, you need 8.0.0.8 FixPack to get the BI Publisher based reporting. so if you're on 8.0.0.x then need to upgrade to 8.0.0.8.

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  6. Do you have any reports of anyone actually getting this to work on 7.8.2.14? We are coming from 7.8.2.10 and have hit some road blocks along the way

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  7. haven't tried 7.8.x. version for myself, but so far didn't hear any issue with this particular release.

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  8. Thanks, Just to let you know there are at least two people with almost identical issues where the UI just freezes after submitting the report request. See this thread - http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1061065&tstart=0

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  9. Did you submit a SR for this ?

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  10. Hi Justin, Kanichiro,

    We are the second company Justin mentioned. Identical crash behaviour of XMLP component on 7.8.2.14 after applying all changes.
    Yes I have opened a Service Request which is already being open for 10 weeks but no progress as of yet.
    So if anyone could help us that would be great.

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  11. Hi Kanichiro,
    finally it is solved.
    If anyone is interested: In our environment this seemed to be caused by a problem with the integration object “runReportResponse”. The IO shipped with 7.8.2.14 is different from the one shipped with 8.1 and after importing the 8.1 version BIP is now working as desired.
    One could also change the two field properties manually:
    IO “runReportResponse” -> IC “runReportReturn” -> field “reportBytes”
    1. change Data Type to “DTYPE_ATTACHMENT”
    2. change Field Type to “System”

    I don't know whether this is a product defect, but it worked for me.

    I've told it to the technician servicing our SR to check.

    Thanks
    Benjamin

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  12. Wanted to update this thread and let everyone know that it does work. The above failure described occurs when trying to use the web service that allows parameterized reports. Thanks Benjamin and Oli for your help figuring this out. Here are the steps that need to be performed to get parameterized reports working.

    This is what you need to do:
    -> Open the IO "runReportResponse"
    -> navigate to the Integration Component named "runReportReturn"
    -> look for the field called "reportBytes"
    -> 1. change the data type from DTYPE_TEXT to DTYPE_ATTACHMENT
    -> 2. change the "Field Type" property from "Data" to "System"

    recompile and run dev2prod ....

    This was figured out by looking at a working 8.1.1.1 instance and finding the difference.

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  13. Benjamin, Justin, Thanks for sharing the info! I have passed it to the product manager of Siebel Reporting.

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  14. Hi ,

    We have recently upgraded to Siebel 7.8.2.14.Since Actuate support has ended we are migrating to BI Publisher as the reporting tool..can you please suggest the action steps and what all installation and versions and patches which we will need to install ????

    Thanks in advance

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