I have taken to recording screen grabs to help some folks out on 'how do I' scenarios. Sometimes a 3 minute video saves a couple of thousand words and several screen shots.

So, per chance you need to know:

1. How to add a page border to your output and/or

2. How to add an under line that runs across the page

Watch this!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UcXHeSF0BM

If you need the template, sample data and output, get them here.

I'm taking requests if you have them.

This week, orphaned table rows and how to avoid them.

Its a bit more subtle than rows breaking across a page border and the solution is a doozy!

Im using another video to demonstrate because

1. I don't have to type and grab screen shots, even thou I have one above
   
2. Its faster and more easily understood, even in my umming and erring English.
   
3. I'm hip and happening and video help is the future kids!
   
4. You get to hear my Southern (England) drawl; a great sleep aid for insomniacs!

Here it is. You might want to 'fullscreen' it. Enjoy!

A while back I wrote up a how to on 2D barcode formats. I kept things generic and covered the basics of getting the barcodes working.  Tony over in Bahrain (for we are truly international :) has had a tough time getting it working under EBS. Mostly to do with the usual bug bear of the JAVA_TOP, XX_TOP and getting class paths set up. Its finally working and Tony wanted to share a document on the 'how' to get PDF417s working under EBS.

Document available here.

Thanks for sharing Tony!

Greetings !!

We now have Oracle BI Publisher 12c (12.2.1.0.0) available. You will be able to get the download, documentation, release notes and certification information in BI Publisher OTN home page. The download is also available from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. This release is part of Fusion Middleware 12c release that includes

• Oracle WebLogic Server 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Coherence 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle TopLink 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Fusion Middleware Infrastructure 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle HTTP Server 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Traffic Director 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle SOA Suite and Business Process Management 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle MapViewer 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle B2B and Healthcare 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Service Bus 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Stream Explorer 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Managed File Transfer 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Data Integrator 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle GoldenGate Monitor and Veridata 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle JDeveloper 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Forms and Reports 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle WebCenter Portal 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle WebCenter Content 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle WebCenter Sites 12c (12.2.1.0.0)
• Oracle Business Intelligence 12c (12.2.1.0.0)

1. Scheduler Job Diagnostics:This feature is primarily to help with custom report designs and for production job analysis. A report author during design time can view SQL Explain Plan and data engine logs to diagnose report performance and other issues. This will also help in diagnostics of a job in production.  
2. Improved handling of large reports online: Large reports are always recommended to be run as scheduled job. However, there are scenarios where in a few reports vary in size from one user to another. For most end users the report may be just a few pages, but for few end users the same report may run into thousands of pages. Such reports are generally designed to be viewed online and sometimes such large reports end up causing stuck thread issue on Weblogic Server. This release enhances the user experience by providing the user an ability to cancel the processing of a large report. Also, the enhanced design will no longer cause any stuck thread issue.
3. Schedule Job Output view control: Administrators can now hide the "make output public" option from the report job schedulers (Consumer Role) to prevent public sharing of report output.

Greetings!!

Wish everyone a very happy Memorial Day !! 

Last week we published in OTN a white paper with title "Oracle BI Publisher Best Practices for SaaS Environments". As the title suggests, this white paper is a compilation of all the best practices for BI Publisher that are relevant to a Cloud Platform, especially for Fusion Applications. You can find the link to this white paper here. We will soon have an updated best practices guide for on-premise installations, so stay tuned.

Have a nice day !! 

Oracle BI Publisher 12.2.1.1.0 has been released this week. The links to download files, documentation and release notes are available from BI Publisher OTN home page. The download is also available from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.

The new features in this release are primarily driven by the integrated Cloud Applications and Platform Services. Data Security, Self-Service, Robustness, Easier Integration and Cloud based Data & Delivery has been the main focus here. Check the new features guide available in the BI Publisher OTN home page for a quick glance at these new features.

Upgrading to Oracle Business Intelligence from 12.2.1.0 to 12.2.1.1 is an in-place upgrade performed by Upgrade Assistant.

Migration of Oracle Business Intelligence from 11g to 12.2.1.1 is an out-of-place upgrade similar to 12.2.1.0 release, but now you do not need to separately migrate BI Publisher configuration as a post migration step and you can use Baseline Validation Tool to verify the upgraded BI Publisher reports. 

Stay tuned for more information on the new features, upgrade and migration.

Have a nice day !

We had a couple of requests for some help this past week with customers' custom font encoders. With 11g/12c BIP its not straightforward to embed your code with the BIP code. In fact; its really simple but it took me a while and some trial and error to get the encoder classes to the right spot and in the right format so that BIP could 'see' and use them.

In 11g/12c the BIP application is exploded out under the servers below the DOMAIN_HOME, in my 11.1.1.7.x install thats ./oracle/BI/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/tmp/_WL_user/bipublisher_11.1.1/6uc731

Under the last directory (which will be different for you) will be a lib directory. Thats where your encoder classes need to sit wrapped in a jar file. Its not the best place to have them as upgrades to the code line may not preserve them but its the only place I found where the classes get loaded that BIP can access the encoder. There are other more standard places under the WLS server but BIP can not access the class and the encoder is not reached.

Just to lay out some of the things I have found out during this investigation:

1. When you compile your class make sure the target java version is appropriate. For the 11.1.1.7.x codeline the version needs to be 1.6. For 12g, its 1.8. If you dont do this, you'll get errors when calling the class.

2. You need to wrap your class up in a jar file. If you use JDeveloper, you can create a deployment profile that will build the jar for you. Its then a case of copying it into the appropriate directory.

3. Make sure your RTF barcode register field command matches the 'package' line in your class. In my class I have:

So my template command is:

make sure they match.

4. In the encode command in the template. Make sure the encoding routine you want to use case matches the one in your encoding class.
In my class:

In my RTF template:

5. When you are testing the RTF template on the server. Forget the barcode font for now and use a clear text font. That way you can make sure the encoder is being called. Once you are happy. Just update the template with the barcode font you need.

6. When JDeveloper creates the jar file it will create the directory structure that matches your package path in the jar.

With all of the steps followed above. You are now ready to deploy the jar file into the server. Depending on how you have configured your server it is going to influence the location of the jar file. On my server, I have a simple install with just an Admin server. You may have multiple managed servers. The jar file will need to reside in all locations for the BIP server to find it.

On my 11g server, I copied the jar file to:

user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/tmp/_WL_user/bipublisher_11.1.1/6uc731/lib

On my 12c server:

user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/bi_server1/tmp/_WL_user/bipublisher_11.1.1/f45tyd/lib

Once copied, you need to bounce the WLS server to get the class loaded. You will then be able to see the encoder at work in the output.

Make a post upgrade note for yourself and others to ensure, that after a patch application. You check that the encoder jar is still present in the above directories. It'll save some head scratching later :0)

Here are my files from testing the solution on 11g.7.x and 12c

• My JDeveloper project - BIPFonts.zip
• My jar file - bipfontsupport.zip

Update: we have had a couple of customers get through this now and they have helpfully noted a couple of points that helped them out.

1.  When moving from 10g to 11g or 12c. On compiling  the custom class For example, from 10G to 11G, the location of XDOBarcodeEncoder changes from oracle.apps.xdo.template.rtf.util to oracle.xdo.template.rtf.util.  so you will need to update your class to reflect the new import location.
2. A reference to "Oracle® Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 11g Release 1 (11.1.1) E22259-04
    Section 7.13, "Advanced Barcode Formatting" It provides an example of source code for a custom class.
and for 12c - Fusion Middleware Report Designer's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

The last part on maps, I promise ... its been a fun ride for me at least :0) If you need to catch up on previous episodes:

• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I
• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up II
• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up III
• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up IV

In this post we're looking at map quality. On the left a JPG map, to the right an SVG output.

If we ignore the fact that they have different levels of features or layers. Imagine getting the maps into a PDF and then printing them. Its pretty clear that the SVG version of the map is going to render better on paper compared to JPG.

Getting the SVG output from mapviewer is pretty straightforward, getting BIP to render it requires a little bit of effort. I have mentioned the XML request that we construct and then do a variable substitution in our servlet. All we need do is add another option to the requested output. Mapviewer supports several flavors of SVG:

• If you specify SVG_STREAM, the stream of the image in SVG Basic (SVGB) format is returned directly;
• If you specify SVG_URL, a URL to an SVG Basic image stored on the MapViewer host system is returned.
• If you specify SVGZ_STREAM, the stream of the image in SVG Compressed (SVGZ) format is returned directly;
• If you specify SVGZ_URL, a URL to an SVG Compressed image stored on the MapViewer host system is returned. SVG Compressed format can effectively reduce the size of the SVG map by 40 to 70 percent compared with SVG Basic format, thus providing better performance.
• If you specify SVGTINY_STREAM, the stream of the image in SVG Tiny (SVGT) format is returned directly;
• If you specify SVGTINY_URL, a URL to an SVG Tiny image stored on the MapViewer host system is returned. (The SVG Tiny format is designed for devices with limited display capabilities, such as cell phones.)

Dont panic, Ive looked at them all for you and we need to use SVGTINY_STREAM. This sends back a complete XML file representation of the map in SVG format. We have a couple of issues:

1. We need to strip the XML declaration from the top of the file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> If we don't BIP will choke on the SVG. Being lazy I just used a string function to strip the line out in my servlet:
   
   dd
   
   
2. We need to stream the SVG back as text. So we need to set the CONTENT_TYPE for the servlet as 'text/javascript'
3. We need to handle the SVG when it comes back to the template. We do not use the
   
   

We have moved to a new blogging platform. This was a post from Pradeep that missed the cut over ...

In release 12.2.1.1, BI Publisher added a new feature - Delivery to Oracle Document Cloud Services (ODCS). Around the same time, BI Publisher was also certified against JCS 12.2.1.x and therefore, today if you have hosted your BI Publisher instance on JCS then we recommend Oracle Document Cloud Services as the delivery channel. Several reasons for this:

1. Easy to configure and manage ODCS in BI Publisher on Oracle Public Cloud. No port or firewall issues.

2. ODCS offers a scalable, robust and secure document storage solution on cloud.

3. ODCS offers document versioning and document metadata support similar to any content management server

4. Supports all business document file formats relevant for BI Publisher

When to use ODCS?

ODCS can be used for all different scenarios where a document need to be securely stored in a server that can be retained for any duration. The scenarios may include:

• Bursting documents to multiple customers at the same time.

  • Invoices to customers

  • HR Payroll reports to its employees

  • Financial Statements

• Storing large or extremely large reports for offline printing

  • End of the Month/Year Statements for Financial Institutions

  • Consolidated department reports

  • Batch reports for Operational data

• Regulatory Data Archival

  • Generating PDF/A-1b or PDF/A-2 format documents

How to Configure ODCS in BI Publisher?

Configuration of ODCS in BI Publisher requires the  URI, username and password. Here the username is expected to have access to the folder where the files are to be delivered.

How to Schedule and Deliver to ODCS?

Delivery to ODCS can be managed through both - a Normal Scheduled Job and a Bursting Job.

A Normal Scheduled Job allows the end user to select a folder from a list of values as shown below

\

In case of Bursting Job, the ODCS delivery information is to be provided in the bursting query as shown below:

Accessing Document in ODCS

Once the documents are delivered to ODCS, they can be accessed by user based on his access to the folder, very similar to FTP or WebDAV access.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates !

For all you BI Publisher fans, here is the good news - BI Publisher is now available with Oracle Analytics Cloud !!

Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) is a scalable and secure public cloud service that provides a full set of capabilities to explore and perform collaborative analytics for your enterprise. You can take data from any source, explore with Data Visualization and collaborate with real-time data. It is available in three flavors - Standard Edition, Data Lake Edition and Enterprise Edition, with Standard Edition giving the base ability to explore data, Data Lake Edition allowing insights into big data, and Enterprise Edition offering the full platter of data exploration, big data analytics, dashboard, enterprise reporting, Essbase etc. Refer to this documentation for additional details on different editions.

With OAC 17.4.5 Enterprise Edition, now you can create pixel perfect report and deliver to a variety of destinations such as email, printer, fax, file server using ftp or WebDAV, Webcenter Content and Content & Experience Cloud. The version of BI Publisher here is 12.2.4.0.

If you have used BI Publisher On-prem, the experience will be very similar feature wise and look-and-feel wise, and therefore you will find it easy to get on-board. If you are new to BI Publisher, you will now be able to create pixel perfect and highly formatted business documents in OAC such as Invoices, Purchase Orders, Dunning Letters, Marketing Collateral, EFT & EDI documents, Financial Statements, Government Forms, Operational Reports, Management Reports, Retail Reports, Shipping Labels with barcodes, Airline boarding passes with PDF417 barcode, Market to Mobile content using QR code, Contracts with fine-print on alternate page, Cross-tab reports, etc.

You can connect to a variety of data sources including BI Subject Areas, BI Analysis and RPD; Schedule your report to run once or as a recurring job; and even burst documents to render in multiple formats and be delivered to multiple destinations.

Can we move from BI Publisher on-prem to BI Publisher on OAC?

Well yes, you can. You will have to understand your on-prem deployment and plan accordingly. If your data can be migrated to OAC, that will be the best otherwise you can plan to extend your network to Oracle Cloud allowing OAC to access your on-prem data. The repository can be migrated by archiving and unarchiving mechanism. User data management will be another task where application roles from On-prem will need to be added to OAC application roles. Details on this will be coming soon.

Benefits of BI Publisher on OAC

First of all OAC comes with many great features around data exploration and visualization with advanced analytics capabilities. BI Publisher compliments this environment for pixel perfect reporting. So now you have an environment that is packed with Industry leading BI products providing an end-to-end solution for an enterprise. 

Managing Server instances will be a cake walk now, with just few clicks you will be able to scale up/down to a different compute shape or scale out/in to manage nodes in the cluster, saving you both time and money.

Many self service features to manage reports and server related resources.

What's new in BI Publisher 12.2.4.0?

BI Publisher in OAC includes all features of 12.2.1.3 and has the following new features in this release:

So why wait? You can quickly check this out by creating a free trial account here. Once you login, you are in OAC home page. To get to BI Publisher you need to click on the Page Menu on right side top of the page and then select option "Open Classic Home". BI Publisher options are available under Published Reporting in the classic home page.

For further details on pixel perfect reporting, check the latest Oracle Analytics Cloud Documentation.

Stay tuned for more updates on upgrade and new features !

A report in Excel format is a very common requirement and BI Publisher can generate excel output using RTF, XSL or Excel Template. Excel template is recommended when the requirement is to create pixel perfect column width, to use built in excel functions, to create multi-sheet output, to handle preceding zeroes in data, to maintain data formatting, to manage high number of columns of data, etc.

How about adding native charts and pivot tables in the excel report ? Well, excel templates can handle that too.  

There is no wizard in the Excel Template Builder to create charts or pivot table, but you can certainly include Excel Pivot Charts and Pivot Tables in your report using MS Excel features. Here is a step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Create Excel Template to build data for Pivot Chart & Pivot Table

Use Excel Template Builder to create Excel Template

Load a sample XML data. Add data column header names.

Use "Insert Field" option from BI Publisher Ribbon Menu and create data place holders as shown below.

You will see an interim dialog box from the Template Builder that a metadata sheet will be created. Click OK on it.

Add looping of data using Insert Repeating Group. Select the For Each entry at the repeating node level

Preview the output. This will bring all records in the excel sheet in a separate .xls output file.

Step 2: Create Pivot Chart & Pivot Table

You can close the output .xls file and stay in the Excel Template. Now select all the data columns to be used in the Pivot Chart and table. You can click on column headers and select the entire column to be included or you can just select the table with column headers and single row of data placeholders. From Excel Menu Insert, select Pivot Chart & Pivot Table option.

In the dialog box "Create PivotTable", you can keep selected the option "Select a table or range" and leave the Table/Range that appears by default based on the selection.

You can choose to create the Pivot Chart and Pivot Table in a new work sheet (recommended).Click OK.

This will add a new Sheet in the Excel file and insert a Pivot Table and Chart place holder, with Pivot Table fields on the right panel

Here you can select the fields for the Pivot table and chart, to be depicted as Axis, Legend and Values. In this example we have included Product Type, Product, LOB and Brand as Axis and Revenue as Values.

Please note that by default the function selected under Values is Count. Therefore, select the drop down next to Count function and choose Value Field Settings, where you can change this to Sum function.

One more thing to note is the presence of Field Buttons in the chart. You can hide these Field Buttons. With Pivot Chart selected, go to Analyze Menu in the Ribbon style Menu, and under Show/Hide section choose "Hide all Field Buttons".

Finally the template will look like this

Step 3: Include dynamic data generated by BI Publisher for Pivot Chart & Pivot Table

Right click on Pivot Chart, select PivotChart Options, select Data tab. Here select the option "Refresh data when opening the file". This will bring the data dynamically into the PIvot Chart and Pivot Table.

You can run preview of the excel output and you will see the pivot table and chart displaying dynamic data.

You will notice blank data appearing in the Pivot Table and Chart. This is due to the way the looping works against the dynamic data. You can hide this blank data by filtering the blank data from the parent field in the pivot table of the output excel file. In this example, we will remove the blank data from Product field and the complete blank section will be removed without affecting rest of the data. To do this, just hover over Product in the right side pane under Pivot Chart Fields and click on the down arrow. This will open the filter options for Product field. Uncheck the Blank value from filter list. 

So, this completes the template design and the final output will look as shown below

You can further include excel functions and formula within these pivot table and charts as necessary for your requirement. You can even change the chart type, style etc. to create the most appropriate visual representation of the data. You can upload the excel template on BI Publisher server and run it against live data. You can include as many sheets with different pivot charts and tables, as required for your report. 

Also note that excel template can be run against any data source type in BI Publisher Data Model. Therefore you can use BI Analysis or even run a BIJDBC SQL query against RPD layer, and bring complex calculations, aggregations as a part of your data. 

Hope this was helpful. If you want to check the sample template and data, download it from here.

Have a great day !!

Last week Oracle BI Suite 12.2.1.4.0 has been released and that includes Oracle BI Publisher 12.2.1.4.0. 

The links to download the installation files, documentation and release notes are available from BI Publisher OTN home page. You can also download the software from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.

The new features introduced in Analytics Cloud Suite for both Data Visualization and BI Publisher are now available for on-prem. You can find the  list of new features for Data Visualization here and for BI Publisher here.

Upgrading to Oracle Business Intelligence from 12.2.1.x to 12.2.1.4 is an in-place upgrade performed by Upgrade Assistant. Refer to the upgrade guide for details on upgrade from a previous 12c version.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Have a great weekend !

Greetings !

Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud (OAAC) version 18.3.3.0 (also known as V5) got released last month. A rich set of new features have been introduced in this release across different products (with product version 12.2.5.0.0) in the suite. You can check all the new features of OAC / OAAC in the video here.

The focus for BI Publisher on OAC / OAAC in this release has been to compliment Data Visualization for pixel perfect reporting, performance optimizations and adding self service abilities. Here is a list of new features added this release:

BI Publisher New Features in OAC V5.0

Now you can leverage a variety of data sources covered by Data Visualization data sets, including Cloud based data sources such as Amazon Redshift, Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud; Big Data sources such as Spark, Impala, Hive; and Application data sources such as Salesforce, Oracle Applications etc. BI Publisher is here to compliment DV to create pixel perfect reports using DV datasets.

Check the documentation for additional details. Also, check this video to see how this feature works.

Now upload all files for custom configuration such as fonts, ICC Profile, Private Keys, Digital Signature etc.from the Upload Center as a self service feature available in the Administration page.

Additional details can be found in the documentation here.

Report Authors can now validate a data model before deploying the report in a production environment. This will help during a custom data model creation where data sets, LOVs and Bursting Queries can be validated against standard guidelines to avoid any undesired performance impact to the report server. 

Details available here.

When a data model contains multiple data sets for different layouts, each layout might not use all the data sets defined in the data model. Now Report Authors can select data model property to skip the execution of the unused data sets in a layout. Setting this property reduces the data extraction time, memory usage and improves overall report performance.

Additional details can be found here.

Digital Signature is widely used feature in on-prem deployments and now this has been added in OAC too, where in Digital Signature can be applied to a PDF output. Digital Signatures can be uploaded from the Upload Center, required signature can be selected under security center, and then applied to PDF outputs by configuring attributes under report properties or run-time properties. 

You can find the documentation here. Also check this video for a quick demonstration.

Now protect your MS Office output files with a password defined at report or server level.

Check the PPTX output properties, DocX output properties, Excel 2007 output properties. 

You can select this option to compress the output by including the file in a zip file before delivery via email, FTP, etc.

Additional details can be found here.

You can opt to get delivery and read-receipt notification for scheduled job delivery via email.

Check documentation for additional details. 

Now you can set up scalability mode for an excel template. This can be done at system level, report level or at template level. By setting this attribute to true, the engine will flush memory after a threshold value and when the data exceeds 65K rows it will rollover data into multiple sheets.

You can find the documentation here.

Stay tuned to hear more updates on features and functionalities ! Happy BIP'ing ...

Greetings to you all !!

As most of you must be aware by now, Oracle has embarked its Analytics offering under a single brand - Oracle Analytics, consolidating a variety of offerings into three key offerings:

1. Oracle Analytics Cloud
2. Oracle Analytics Server
3. Oracle Analytics for Applications

You can get more insight to these offerings in this blog article titled "Welcome to a new Era of Analytics" by Michael Singer and also at Oracle Analytics website. Oracle has taken a big leap in defining the next wave in business analytics boosted by AI, Augmented Analytics, NLP, while continuing to modernize the core strength of enterprise reporting. Oracle has recently been named a Leader by Forrester Wave. You can find the details here in the article by John Haggerty. And if you like to know how Oracle Analytics is placed against its competitors, then please check this comparison link.  

So what is happening with BI Publisher? As you all know BI Publisher has been part of Oracle Analytics Cloud Enterprise Edition version 4.0 onward. With recent re-branding exercise, BI Publisher will be available as Oracle Analytics Publisher. 

So why Oracle Analytics Publisher in OAC makes most sense for your enterprise for your business documents?

Well, when it comes to creating pixel perfect reports, invoices, purchase orders, shipping labels, collateral, etc. for your enterprise, Oracle Analytics Publisher has had an excellence all these years. Now it brings additional benefits for you on the cloud that makes it the right choice for all your business documents:

1. No Upfront Infrastructure Cost: This is no-brainer, a big reason why you want to switch your application to cloud is because you can just get started with no investment for server infrastructure. This stands out in case of enterprise reporting because many a times the size of data and report is extremely large and there is a huge infrastructure cost to process such large reports using high performing servers.
2. Simplified pricing models: You can pick from a simplified pricing model that works for your enterprise - Per Named User basis or OCPU per hour usage basis (Pay as you go & Universal Credits Monthly Flex) for both New User Subscription and BYOL subscription. You can find out the details here.
3. Scale Up/Scale Down on Demand: Many reports see a spike in usage during month ends, quarter ends, year ends etc (such as reports uploaded by dealerships, combined monthly or yearly statements, tax statements etc.). Now you can scale up/down on demand and only pay by usage. To plan your service, check for the processing limits by compute shape here.
4. High Availability: All Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environments are built with high availability architecture to provide zero down time and also ensures complete data backup and recovery.
5. Data Security: Data Security is paramount on Cloud and therefore, data sources and delivery channels are secured with SSL enablement. 
6. Patching & Upgrade: For Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Managed OCI-Classic, Oracle manages your cloud environments that includes patching and upgrade, thereby taking away all the worry of frequent patching and upgrade and allowing customer to focus on its business. 
7. Integrated with other components in Analytics Cloud: Publisher in OAC can leverage Self Service Data Sources (DV Data sets and data flows), Subject Areas, Semantic Layer data sources etc. You can connect to over 40 data sources that includes several cloud based data sources and Big Data Sources. You can even directly connect to Semantic Layer using BIJDBC, BI Analysis and OAC Esssbase.
8. Application Integration Options: You can use REST APIs to integrate reports in your application. The Publisher REST API information can be found here for now. The REST API for Scheduled Jobs will be available soon with the next release that would include Normal and Bursting Jobs.  
9. Easy to Migrate reports from On-prem: You can migrate reports from your on-premise environment (11g or 12c) to OAC using snapshots. You can find the details here.
10. Connect to On-Prem Data: In OCI-Classic, one can connect to on-prem data sources by use of VPN. In OCI, You can leverage the OAC data sources (data sets and data flows) from Publisher Data model to connect to on-prem data sources. OAC data connections in turn can use Data Gateway/Remote Data Connector (RDC v1). Although this would mean extra effort to update to your existing data models and also there can be limitations. There are ongoing efforts to improve this ability for OCI, till that time you can plan to stay on OCI-Classic if you have many reports to connect to on-prem data source.
11. Ease of Managing Reports: With several new features to help with self service ability, you will find authoring and managing reports much easier. You can upload custom fonts, SSL certificates, Public Keys, digital certificates and apply them in few clicks.You can enable Audit to log user activities, define mandatory parameters to impede run-away report executions, compress output before sending through delivery channels and many more such new features. You can check the new features list here.

So, if you have not tried yet, or are using BI Publisher in your On-Prem environment, you can quickly create a trial account and get started. You can migrate your reports from on-prem These reports can be your production reports, operation reports, financial statements, Invoices, Purchase Orders, Bill Of Material, Shipping Labels, Collaterals or any business document.

Have a great day !!