Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher is a reporting and publishing application that enables you to extract data from multiple data sources, create a template to lay out the data in a report, and publish the report to numerous output formats. BI Publisher also enables you to schedule reports and deliver the reports to any delivery channel required by your business.

Administering BI Publisher requires setting up and maintaining the following system components:

• BI Publisher security
• Data source connections
• Integrations with other Oracle products
• Report delivery options
• Runtime configuration settings
• BI Publisher Scheduler configurations
• System maintenance options

Integration
Oracle BI Publisher enables you to integrate with the following products:
• Oracle BI Presentation Services - This integration enables you to use Oracle BI Answers requests as data sources for your reports.

• Oracle BI Discoverer - This integration enables you to use Oracle BI Discoverer Worksheets as data sources for your reports.

• Hyperion Workspace and Shared Services - This integration enables you to access BI Publisher from within the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Workspace.

• Oracle Smart Space Client - This integration enables you to set up a link to the Oracle Smart Space download page. This will enable all BI Publisher users to easily access the Oracle Smart Space client download page from their BI Publisher session.

• Oracle E-Business Suite – This integration can be done by uploading a DBC file to recognize your Oracle E-Business Suite users.

• Oracle BI Server – This can be integrated by setting up the BI Publisher roles in your BI Server Administration tool then configure BI Publisher to integrate with it.


Integrating with Oracle E-Business Suite
1. In the Oracle E-Business Suite, log in as a System Administrator and create the following responsibilities to correspond to the BI Publisher functional roles:

• XMLP_ADMIN – this is the administrator role for the BI Publisher server.
• XMLP_DEVELOPER – allows users to build reports in the system.
• XMLP_SCHEDULER – allows users to schedule reports.
• XMLP_ANALYZER_EXCEL – allows users to use the Excel analysis feature.
• XMLP_ANALYZER_ONLINE – allows users to use the online analysis feature.
• XMLP_TEMPLATE_DESIGNER - allows users to connect to the BI Publisher
server from the Template Builder and to upload and download templates.

2. Add the new BI Publisher responsibilities to the appropriate Users.

3. Log in to BI Publisher Enterprise. From the Admin tab, select Security Configuration.

4. In the Security Model section of the page, select Oracle E-Business Suite from the list.

5. Load your dbc file from the E-Business Suite instance. This is typically located under the $FND_SECURE directory. If you do not have access to this file, contact your E-Business Suite system administrator. This file specifies how BI Publisher should access the E-Business Suite instance.

6. It is recommended that you create a local super user for the system to allow you to access the Administrator pages once the changes take effect. Select the Enable Local Superuser check box and enter a username and password for the user under the Local Superuser section of the Security Configuration tab.

7. Restart the BI Publisher server for the security changes to take effect.
Once you restart the system, all your E-Business Suite responsibilities will be visible as roles in the BI Publisher security center. Add folders to the E-Business Suite roles.

Integrating with Oracle BI Server Security
This is done by defining BI Publisher functional roles within the Oracle BI Server Administration tool, assign users to these groups, and then specify Oracle BI Security as your security model in the BI Publisher Admin interface.

1. In the BI Server Administration tool, create the following groups to correspond to the BI Publisher functional roles:
• XMLP_ADMIN – this is the administrator role for the BI Publisher server.
• XMLP_DEVELOPER – allows users to build reports in the system.
• XMLP_SCHEDULER – allows users to schedule reports.
• XMLP_ANALYZER_EXCEL – allows users to use the Excel analysis feature.
• XMLP_ANALYZER_ONLINE – allows users to use the online analysis feature.
• XMLP_TEMPLATE_DESIGNER - allows users to connect to the BI Publisher
server from the Template Builder and to upload and download templates.

2. Add the appropriate users to the BI Publisher groups in the BI Server Administration tool.

3. In the BI Publisher Enterprise application, log in with Administration privileges. From the Admin tab select Security Configuration.

4. In the Security Model section of the page, select Oracle BI Server from the list. Provide the following connection information for the BI Server:
• JDBC Connection String - example: jdbc:oraclebi://host:port/
• Administrator Username and Administrator Password
• Database Driver Class - example: oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver

5. It is recommended that you create a local super user for the system to allow you to access the Administrator pages once the changes take effect. Select the Enable Local Superuser check box and enter a username and password for the user under the Local Superuser section of the Security Configuration tab.

6. Restart the BI Publisher server for the security changes to take effect.

Logging into Business Intelligence Publisher

1. Navigate to the URL provided by your system administrator. The URL is of the format http://hostname:port/xmlpserver/

2. Select the language you prefer for the user interface.

3. Enter your credentials to log in to BI Publisher.

4. Select Accessibility Mode if you wish to render the Reports home page in an accessible tree structure.

5. Select Sign In.

This setup is with respect to  Oracle Applications 11.5.10.2 instance.

First apply patch - 6898666. This patch is available via Metalink. As always, please review the prereqs. If you are patched up to 11.5.10.2, you should be fine.

In order to upload budgets with Excel, you will need to create the profile option, "GL: Default Desktop Viewer". You can find more information pertaining to the steps for setting up this profile option in Metalink note 556280.1.

When trying to upload a budget for the first time, you may encounter the error: "You do not have permission to access this functionality". This error is normal. It can be corrected by setting the profile option: "BNE Allow No Security Rule" to Yes at the Responsibility level. You can find more information pertaining to this error in Metalink note 559924.1.

With the three steps above you will be uploading budgets via WebADI in no time.

Setup for for multiple sets of books

First create a new responsibility for WebADI, similar to the WebADI responsibility seeded. (Copy the menu name and data group seeded in the responsibilities setup form.) 

Associate the new responsibility with the SOB via the "GL: Set of Books Name" profile option at the responsibility level.  

Assign the responsibility to a user. 

Common Segments used across Enterprises

Given below are some of the common segment titles that many organizations define with separate account segments:

Company  A segment that indicates legal entities for commercial, for–profit organizations.

Fund   A segment that indicates a fiscal and accounting entity with a self–balancing set of accounts for governmental or not–for–profit organizations.

Cost Center or Department   A segment that indicates functional areas of your business or agency, such as Accounting, Facilities, Shipping, and so on.

Account   A segment that indicates traditional “Natural Account”, such as Cash, Current Asset, Accounts Payable, or Salary Expense.

Product   A segment that indicates products, such as disk drives, printer cables or magnetic tapes manufactured by a commercial, for–profit organization.

Program   A segment that indicates programs, such as, for a university, scholarship program, endowment program, or annual giving program.

Project   A segment that indicates projects such as work orders, contracts, grants, or other entities for which you want to track revenues and expenses.

State/District/Geography   A segment that indicates geographical locations, such as Northern California, Central Florida or Western New York.

Distribution Channel   A segment that indicates the method by which your product reaches your customer, such as Wholesale, Retail, OEM, and so on.

Intercompany   A segment that indicates intercompany entities. If your subsidiaries share the same set of books, you can use an intercompany segment to identify subsidiaries involved in intercompany-transactions. This segment usually mirrors your company segment (balancing legal entity segment).

Best Practices for defining Segments

*   Determine the segment that captures the natural account, such as assets, liabilities, expenses, and validate whether you need sub-accounts. Use child-parent relationships to define your account hierarchy.

*   Define a separate Accounting Flexfield segment for each dimension of your organization on which you want detailed reporting, such as regions, products, services, programs, and projects. For example, you may want to record and report on expenses by project. To do this, your account must categorize expenses by project. Define your account to include a “Project” segment. By doing this, you automatically categorize all your accounting information by project as you enter it, and you can easily report on project information.

*   Group similar business dimensions into one segment. This allows a more simplified and flexible accounting structure. For example, you only need one segment to record and report on both districts and regions, as illustrated below. Because regions are simply groups of districts, you can easily create regions within your district segment by defining a parent for each region with the relevant districts as children. Use these parents when defining summary accounts to maintain account balances and reporting hierarchies to perform regional reporting.

*   Consider information you track in other accounting information systems. You may not need to capture certain organizational dimensions if another system already records and reports on this information. For example, if you need to report on sales by product and your sales tracking system already provides this information, General Ledger account structure does not need to categorize information by product. If you are a government or not–for–profit agency using a labor costing system which captures work breakdown structure for reimbursable billing, you may not need to capture this in your account structure.

*   Identify segments that you might need in the future. Consider future expansion and possible changes in your organization and reporting needs. For example, you may not need a region segment now, but eventually you plan to expand you organization to cover multiple regions. Determine the length of each segment. Consider the structure of values you plan to maintain within the segment. For example, you might use a 3 character segment to capture project information, and classify your projects so that all administrative projects are in the 100 to 199 range, all the facilities projects are in the 200 to 299 range, and so on. If you develop more than 10 classifications of projects, you would run out of values within this segment. You might want to add an extra character to the size of each segment to anticipate future needs.

*   If you want to perform multi–company or fund accounting within a set of books, choose a balancing segment. You must define one and only one balancing segment in your account. General Ledger automatically balances all journal entries for each value of this balancing segment and performs any necessary intercompany or interfund posting to the intercompany or interfund account you specify when you define your set of books.

*   If you plan to maintain and consolidate multiple set of books, think of common elements among your separate account structures. Consider which segments can share value sets, or where opportunities for rolling up segments from a subsidiary set of books into a parent set of books exist.

Plan your value sets. To reduce maintenance and to maintain consistency between sets of books, you can use value sets when defining multiple charts of accounts. Using the same value sets allow two different sets of books to reference the same segment values and descriptions for a specified segment.

*   For example, the values in your natural account segment, such as Cash, Accounts Payable, and so on, may be equally applicable to each of your sets of books. Ideally, when you set up a new set of books you should consider how you would map your new Accounting Flexfield segments for consolidation. When a common natural account segment is used between sets of books, it is easier to map account balances from your subsidiary sets of books to a consolidating entity.