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:
Accessible PDF Support (Tagged PDF & PDF/UA-1)
New Barcodes - QR Code and PDF417
Ability to purge Job History
Ability to view diagnostic log for online report
Widow-orphan support for RTF template
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 !