Today we’ll discuss why businesses need to adopt Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BI Publisher) as a reporting tool when migrating from PeopleSoft Crystal reports and how you can leverage automation to expedite the migration process.
With Oracle announcing that PeopleSoft will end support for all Crystal Reports following the end of Premier Support for 9.1 applications, customers are now evaluating multiple reporting tools to take advantage of the new reporting and analytic capabilities that PeopleSoft offers.
Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BI Publisher) is the obvious choice.
It is included in the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Oracle JD Edwards Enterprise and also it is released as a stand-alone product.
Many customers have implemented BI Publisher as a stand-alone/part of their Enterprise systems to author, manage and deliver reports and critical business documents as it is easy to create and maintain highly formatted documents.
Here we discuss, why customers need to migrate to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BI Publisher) and how automation can speed up the process while preserving the functionality of the original PeopleSoft reports.
Why BI Publisher?
Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BI Publisher, formerly XML Publisher) is an enterprise reporting solution. It separates the data extraction process from the report layout, which enables customers to design and create report layout templates with the more common desktop applications of Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat, rendering XML data based on these templates.
BI Publisher reports can be generated in many formats (PDF, RTF, Excel, HTML, and so on) in many languages from a single template. You can also create lightweight interactive management reports by use of highly intuitive drag and drop style web-based layout editor.
BI Publisher offers the following benefits:
1. Pre-integrated with Oracle – Works seamlessly with Oracle business intelligence solutions, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle Hyperion Planning, and Oracle Application Express (APEX).
2. Separate data logic, layout & translation – which is easier to maintain and provides greater flexibility and reuse. You can support multiple language templates against a single data set
3. Better Managed – BI Publisher can have multiple layouts for a single dataset, thereby reducing the number of reports.
4. Highly formatted and interactive – Users can view a report in interactive mode for lightweight analysis and generate pixel-perfect reports
5. Improved performance – It is based on the W3C XSL-FO standard and can handle extensive data.
6. Flexible layout editor – Helps you to easily create report layouts directly in a web browser or with familiar desktop tools, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Adobe Acrobat.
7. Connectivity to any data source – You can create reports from virtually any data source with a JDBC connection, including web services, HTTP XML feeds, and file data source.
8. Scheduling and bursting – Schedule a single report (with personalized content) to be delivered to multiple destinations via multiple output formats.
9. Hot-pluggable – Integrates with custom applications via web services or Java APIs.
Report Conversion is Easy with DataTerrain Automation Tools
Enterprise BI platforms use a variety of reports that can affect the migration approach. The reports can be migrated in a big bang or a phase-wise or a business-wise approach. Contact DataTerrain today for help with converting to Oracle BI Publisher from Crystal Reports, and learn more about our other report conversion services.