BI
New Oracle Page talks to Solutions for Addressing American Recovery Act BI and Other Needs
At Collaborate, I learned about some interesting new collateral that Oracle has put together around the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I thought I’d pass on. Oracle has compiled this at http://www.oracle.com/goto/arra. I haven’t had the chance to review it all yet, but there is a lengthy white-paper, a recorded Web-Conference and other info anyone can browse. The solutions illustrate how the OBIEE infrastructure and technology can be leveraged to provide a dashboard such as below and other BI capabilities. Other tools/solutions to help are also addressed. While this stuff is certainly not “Out of the Box” and would definitely require a good amount of work (assuming the source data is available to support this kind of analysis), I found it an interesting example of how the OBIEE infrastructure can be leveraged to provide key dashboards and info for this relevant topic to help keep senior executives, Congress and others happy. Note: this is not part of the Oracle BI Apps Federal Financials offering just announced, so if you’re an E-Business Suite customer thinking this would be a snap to implement, not exactly. But certainly a lot of E-Business Suite data could be leveraged to support this type of dashboard reporting.
Installing Discoverer 10.1.2.3 Client Software on Vista (32 & 64-bit)
Although not Federal specific, I thought I’d post the steps I came up with a ways back to install the latest Discoverer client tools (Desktop and Administrator) on Vista as there’s a bit more to the approach than a couple clicks. I know of a number of users who fought with the process for a few days, so just follow this if you need to install and you should be good to go. A co-worker recently confirmed this approach also works for Vista 64-bit. Here is the doc I put together.
-Update 1June09: I did successfully install on Vista 64-bit using the doc. I added two items to the doc: 1) Be sure to always execute the install processes as Adminstrator (right click on the setup.exe and select ‘Run as Adminstrator), and 2) I suggest using a short path name for where you unzip the files (e.g. c:\oraclesoftware\BI Tools 10g), as the installer seems to fail when executing from a directory with a long path name.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Webinar on NoetixViews for Oracle U.S. Federal Financials Available for Replay
If you were interested in attending the webinar on the new NoetixViews for Federal Financials, but weren’t able to sit in on it this week, Noetix has made it available for download here. The webinar includes live demos. I sat in on the call and I thought it was a good presentation. Noetix has developed and is now offering 35 Federal-specific views (of course, some provide a lot more value than others) in addition to their many other standard Oracle E-Business Suite views. The views are based on both 11i and R12 accounting architectures, so R12 Federal customers can benefit from the increased capabilities that SLA brings to the table, while 11i customers can still get value from the offering. Any real-solid Federal Financials consultant could develop most of what they’ve got so far, but I think they’ve put together a good starting baseline of views that an agency can simply purchase instead of needing to develop in-house and maintain. Potentially, the offering could also be expanded/extended in the future to include even more views. The status of funds views provides real-time capability, which shows that Noetix has done their homework to understand what’s going on underneath the covers of Oracle Fed Financials (e.g. merging funds available balances from gl_balances and gl_bc_packets together to give a real-time picture).
Noetix’s web-page on the Federal Financials offering is here.
I was impressed by the work that went into putting the help documentation together on these views and fields. While help documentation is often an afterthought, Noetix, seemed to put a decent amount of time into explaining each view and each field within the view. So then users who are working to create reports on the views (whether in Discoverer, OBIEE, or other BI tool) can get a good understanding of what the view and data elements are going to provide them in the report. Noetix’s goal is to make life easier for query users and thus the reason for the focus on providing good documentation, as obviously that is key in helping the users better understand the fields they need to complete their report objectives (versus having like 2 people in the organization who can really build reports, because no-one else understands the data good enough).
I’ve also got a copy of the static PowerPoint presentation here if you’d be interested in looking at that also.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6 Released: Includes Oracle Federal Financials Analytics
We’ve been hearing about the canned Federal Financials OBIEE analytics capability for some time, and now it has been released. From an initial look, it looks like this initial Federal-specific batch of canned offerings includes 2 Dashboards, one focused on various Federal Balance Sheet metrics and the other focused on Federal Budget & Spending. Of course there are plenty of dashboards, metrics and reports in the standard Financial Analytics offering that are useful in Federal Financial management as well. At a first glance, it looks like these new Federal pieces are just using an 11i10 adapter and not R12, so we’ll have to look further into that.
A good initial summary of this latest release is available in this Oracle BI Blog Post. A bit more detail can be extracted from the BI Apps 7.9.6 Licensing and Packaging Guide here. Note, a bunch of the documentation links for this new release aren’t working yet, but I’m sure they’ll get that straightened out before too long.
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Oracle Federal Applications 