Actuate to BI Publisher

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 Also be aware that Oracle has withdrawn support for the Actuate Report Adapter that they were offering with 8.1: it’s no longer available for download, so it’s going to have to be BIP all the way!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.