Siebel - BIP Reports

BI Publisher is a template-based publishing engine developed by Oracle. It allows customers to rapidly develop or modify reports templates. Siebel application uses Oracle BI Publisher report engine to generate Siebel reports.

It is based on industry standard technologies such as XML and Web Services. It utilizes familiar software (Microsoft Word) as a development tool. It supports various report viewer applications such as Adobe Reader, MS Word and MS Excel.

Oracle earlier had XML Publisher (acronym – XMLP) tool to work with reports. BI Publisher is an extension to this tool. This is the reason why you may see ‘XMLP’ at various places – files, folders, web-services etc.

Certain properties of Siebel/BIP report are as follow:

• Reports are assigned to specific views. Users, with access to these views only, would be able to use mapped reports.
• Reports are not available globally.
• Reports can be generated in two modes – Real Time and Scheduled.
• Reports are saved on Siebel File System. Thus, once generated  reports can be accessed later on.

Advantage of BIP over Actuate

Actuate (Developer)                                                       BI Publisher (End User)

1. Uses COM to talk to siebel. This                                  1. Uses web services. This mean
    means report object in a tool,                                          Integration objects, SOAP
   .ROL files and siebel.bas                                                       messages and XML

2.Generate report object library                                    2. Generate XML data

3. Create report in actuate                                                3. Create report layout template
                                                                                                           in a word
4. Compile report                                                                  4. Don't need to compile report

5. Deploy report executable                                             5. upload template

6. Associate report with view                                           6. Associate with view, no restart
     and deploy SRF                                                                      of server