PeopleTools 8.5 and OBIEE: There’s Value in Those Hills

November 5, 2009
Larry Zagata
News

We have posted multiple posts on the new PeopleTools 8.5 release (here’s our most popular; here’s our shameless plug), in addition to several posts on the value of Oracle OBIEE and BI apps. However, today’s post will talk about PeopleTools 8.5: for customers who have both PeopleSoft and Oracle OBIEE, there is some additional value to upgrading to PeopleTools 8.5.

With PeopleTools 8.5 there are some new integration capabilities which may offer significant value and bring your organization closer to the ideal state of embedding business intelligence into the business process.

From the PeopleTools 8.5 release notes:

OBIEE to PeopleSoft URL Integration

Developers and OBIEE administrators can enable navigation from OBIEE Answers or Dashboards to the PeopleSoft transaction page without hard coding the PeopleSoft URL during OBIEE setup and configuration. PeopleTools exposes a component API as a standard Web Service that can be consumed by OBIEE at design time. In addition, the web service can expose the key structure information when appended to the URL as a query string. Including the key information enables the system to identify a specific transaction row within a PeopleSoft table.

After successfully defining and embedding the action links to specific PeopleSoft table columns (DeptID and SETID), when the user clicks on the action links for a given row of data (DeptID = 10000 and SetID = SHARE) the bind parameters of the PeopleSoft Component URL are mapped to their actual runtime values. The user is then directly navigated to the PeopleSoft Department component, which displays transaction details specific to the row of data in the OBIEE Answers of Dashboards.

This is a wonderful feature allowing direct navigation from OBIEE to the original transaction details.

Another worthwhile bit:

OBIEE Report Integration

PeopleTools enables you to integrate OBIEE reports with PeopleSoft applications. To enable OBIEE report integration, PeopleTools includes the Analytics servlet, an Oracle BI Presentation service plug-in and part of Oracle BI Web Component. This servlet communicates to the Oracle BI Presentation server and acts as a client which forwards the request made from PeopleSoft to the listening Oracle BI Presentation service. The OBIEE server provides the HTML markup to be displayed in its entirety in the PeopleSoft user interface.

After configuring and deploying the Analytics servlet, you must define the analytics server in the PeopleSoft application. Once the PeopleSoft application recognizes the analytics server, you can retrieve, access, and view OBIEE report details as your security permits. In this implementation, you must configure and store the OBIEE administrator credentials in the PeopleSoft application. The PeopleSoft application uses these credentials to login to the OBIEE server, impersonate a real user, and establish a session.

You can configure OBIEE reports as pagelets, embedded pagelets, and as transaction pages. As part of OBIEE integration, Pagelet Wizard supports the use of OBIEE reports as the data source for any of the supported output types. Embeddable pagelets can be used to create Related Content services for the OBIEE reports. Using the related content framework, these OBIEE report type of related content services can be used with application transaction pages in a context sensitive manner. The context is provided by the page fields on the transactional page, and is used to render OBIEE reports, based on these page field values.

Another terrific feature that allows users to execute OBIEE reports based upon the context of the transaction page they are on. This allows BI to become part of the business transaction process and not an afterthought. These new features should really open up BI capabilities for those customers owning both PeopleSoft and Oracle OBIEE.

Questions about this? Simply email me.

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Previously by Larry Zagata: