In the first of my Reporting articles, I’ll discuss some of the architectural changes that have taken place in the move from Actuate to BI Publisher (hereafter referred to as BIP). With Siebel 8.1.1.2 the recommended version of BIP is 10.1.3.4.1. You’ll need this if you want to use report scheduling from within Siebel.

Typically, the Actuate Report Server application server is hosted in a load balanced configuration, with one master server and one slave. Internal Actuate load balancing handled the shared encyclopedia and balancing of requests. Siebel required the configuration of a virtual host (rshost) , telling it where to find the Report Server, and a component parameter, Actuate Server Connect String, telling the component the Siebel connect string to use to connect to an Object Manager to retrieve data. As you may recall, Actuate uses the COM Data Server to pull data through the Business Object layer.

Things are not too different in BIP. Server setup is straightforward and load balancing and clustering can be configured. Refer to this Oracle document for more information. When it comes to actual installation, it is essential that you follow the updated installation guide in Siebel Bookshelf. The original 8.1.1 guide misses a number of critical set up steps. I have a customized, step by step installation guide to hand – please email me if you’d like a copy.

Configuration for Siebel is a little more complex. Siebel now has a dedicated ‘XMLP Report Server’ component which you’ll need to license, enable and configure. BIP exposes Web Services that allow requesting and scheduling of reports, while Siebel exposes Web Services to allow BIP to query and retrieve data through EAI. As such, various entry points and URLs must be configured. Again, steps are documented in Bookshelf, so I won’t list them here. Provided you following every step and subsection in the Reports Guide, you should not have any problems. Resist the temptation to stride ahead and skip a section!

A number of things to check if it doesn’t work first time:

I’m conscious that I’ve not gone into a massive amount of detail around this area, but bookshelf and MOS combined should be enough to get things running. If you have any specific issues, please feel free to post.

Having recently upgraded the Actuate reporting solution in a client’s 7.8 SIA implementation to 8.1.1.2, I thought I’d share my thoughts. The move from Actuate to BI Publisher (BIP) is not as terrifying as it may first appear, but there are some gotchas in there that you need to be prepared for. In the next series of articles, I’ll have a look into what has changed and what you need to do to succesfully migrate across to the new platform. Be aware that 8.1.1.2 has delivered a bunch of stuff around integration with BIP: if you’re looking to upgrade, 8.1.1.2 (or 8.2 if you’re Public Sector) is the way to go. Also be aware that Oracle has withdrawn support for the Actuate Report Adapter that they were offering with 8.1: it’s no longer available for download, so it’s going to have to be BIP all the way!

Here’s what I’m going to cover over the coming weeks:

1. Architecture - what’s changed and how to set up BIP. We’ll briefly touch on high availability and load balancing, since you’re likely to be migrating within an HA production architecture anyway
2. Application and Server Configuration – there’s a fair bit of setup involved in getting BIP working in your Siebel environment. A number of patches and MOS supplied SIFs will be required if you want to replicate some of the more complex functionality from previous versions. There’s also some configuration required around Web Services, authentication and Java class libraries. Be prepared to dig through bookshelf in conjunction with MOS and ad-hoc Oracle documentation updates
3. Report Migration – moving from Actuate Report Design (.rod) files is not as tough as it may seem. Where Actuate used the COM control to pull data through the BO layer, BIP uses Web Services and Integration Objects to pull data through EAI. BIP also provides a number of features within it’s Word plugin tool to deliver comlex report content, with a Siebel provided Java library of functions topping off the tools to migrate reports

It can be a daunting prospect migrating to a different product, especially when you have something tightly integrated into your environment and business processes. On this site, we use calls to Actuate from Workflow to generate documentation as part of several different business processes. We had the ‘Report Business Service’ to help us in the old days, but Oracle have yet seen fit to provide equivalent functionality for BIP. However, later on we’ll see how to overcome these limitations and deliver like for like functionality.