Actuate to BI Publisher conversion in Siebel 8.1.1

Lot of users/customers still has issues and questions understanding whats going on with Actuate Reporting? Well, Actuate will not going to be supported with and 8.1.1 as per my understanding and for the customer who are planning to upgrade to Siebel 8.1.1 should also plan well in advance to move their reporting system from Actuate 8.0 to BI Publisher. BIP is being provided OOB with Siebel 8.1.1 and most of the OOB actuate reports are already been converted to BI Publisher reports in this version.
Note: With not supported I mean oracle might not provide support for this reporting tool anymore. Licensee who purchased from Siebel/Oracle can continue to run on Actuate as long as they want as it's a perpetual license. Actuate maintenance for the Actuate software will need to be purchased through Actuate directly though after December 31^st, 2009.



Once an SR has been raised the Technical Support Engineer needs to contact Siebel Product Management with the information below to obtain a unique/temporary password that can be given to the customer to download from Metalink. The password is valid for 7 days.

The Siebel Reports Adapter is available on AIX, Windows, Solaris, Linux and HP-UX (Note hybrid architecture, HP-Itanium Siebel Server and any other platform for Reports Server since Actuate is not supported on HP-Itanium).

Siebel Reports Adapter

The Siebel Reports Adapter is available for upgrading customers only and enables Actuate reports to run with Siebel 8.1.1. The Siebel Reports Adapter is available from Oracle Siebel Technical Support

Functional Overview

In the Siebel 8.1.1 release there is a new reporting tool, known as Siebel BI Publisher (or Siebel BIP). Siebel BIP is to be documented in the Reports Admin guide, and is the replacement for Actuate.

To create reports it uses EAI technology to extract the data, then Oracle BI Publisher to produce the reports based on a predefined report template and the extracted siebel data. To generate the report data we use Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Server (via Webservice call)

Here is a brief summary of how reports are defined with Siebel BI Publisher:


Data definition:
The definition of the data to be available for the report is in Integration Objects.
All BIP Integration Objects need to be prefixed "BIP". A number of OOTB Integration Objects are supplied.

If customers have custom buscomps/views etc, some of these OOTB Integration Objects may not be suitable, so new Integration Objects would need to be created in Siebel Tools.

There is a view, which enables users to generate a sample data/XML file based on the Integration Object.

Report Definition:
Oracle XML Publisher plugin for Microsoft Word is used to create the report template files. It uses the XML file, generated from the sample view as a source.

Report Registration
Reports are registered and associated with a BIP Integration Object and report template.

View Association
A view is asscoiated with one or more of the registered Bip reports.

Actuate Report Conversion Assistance

There is a .zip file that could be downloaded from metalink3. This utility only works on windows client. The utility internally has a 'run' command that need to be executed to convert Actuate outputs (.bas) to .rtf format.

Actuate Conversion Summary

The Actuate Conversion project was designed to provide out of the box report templates for the BI Publisher integration in Whistler. This was designed as a tool and consists of two main functionalities:

1. The Layout Creator - This is the Java program, which takes the Actuate (.BAS) file, parses all the controls, functions and creates an RTF template with the data place holders. This tool also extends to convert key functions, simple controls (Charts, Tables) to the equivalent BI publisher report artifact

2. The IO Creator - This is the Java program, which uses the Siebel Report definition and creates equivalent Integration Object, Component and Fields

Following diagram depicts the Actuate Conversion process: