Recently I had a discussion with some participants of the OBUG on how to prepare for Fusion Applications. Their views were that it is still more technology driven and from an Applications perspective they should not be involved at the moment.

It’s true that momentarily the focus from Oracle is on the SOA suite and other more technical components. Still it’s my opinion that as a customer or a system integrator you already should start preparing for Fusion Applications.

Oracle announced the new version of the Oracle BPA Suite. With this version integration between the BPA Suite (BPM) and the SOA Suite (BPEL) is possible.

I’m planning to install this new version to see how the integration between the BPA Suite and the SOA suite is working. Check this blog for more information and my progress.

Press release: http://www.oracle.com/newsletters….

XML Publisher is important for Oracle Applications, especially for Oracle Reports. Tim dexter’s post mentions the fact that Oracle is now internally converting all of the EBS Oracle Reports to XML Publisher. For all intents and purposes we can safely say that Oracle Reports in the Ebusiness suite are dead and burried (As will Oracle Forms be in a while in favour of the J2EE stack. That at least is my humble opinion. But that’s food for another post). In this post I will cover the issues on how to integrate Oracle E-business Suite Reports and XML Publisher.

BI Publisher provides a utility to facilitate the conversion of Oracle Reports (version 9i and later) to BI Publisher Reports. The conversion is a two-step process requiring a data model conversion and a layout conversion using the following new APIs:

• DataTemplateGenerator API converts the Oracle Reports data model to an XML Publisher data template.
• RTFTemplateGenerator API converts the Oracle Reports layout to an XML Publisher RTF template.

While using this utility, I ran accross a number of errors and an incomplete user guide. Migrating Apps Reports is certainly not a straightforward task. So lets look into this migration utility.

Oracle BI Publisher (XML Publisher) 5.6.3 is out. Check out Tim Dexter’s Blog.
Patch is 5472959 – XDO/ORACLE XML PUBLISHER OA ROLLUP PATCH 5.6.3

A selection of the new features:

• Template Builder Enhancements and Name Change
• Report Migration Utility
• Support for Rotated Text in RTF Templates
• Conditional Formatting Enhancement in RTF Templates
• Data Template Enhancements

I’m particularly interested in the Report Migration Utility:

XML Publisher provides a utility to facilitate the conversion of Oracle Reports (version 9i and later) to XML Publisher Reports

I will be coming out with a white paper on how to use this utility soon.