EPM Workspace 11.1.1 Integration with OBIEE 10.1.3.4

Something I've been working on in my spare time recently, is getting integration with EPM Workspace 11.1.x working with OBIEE. The basic idea here is that EPM Workspace can act as a "container" for both your Hyperion and OBIEE tools, so that users can sign on once and access all of their BI tools from one "workspace".

Setting everything up was certainly an "interesting" experience, as the documentation (in the OBIEE 10.1.3.4 New Features Guide) is fairly detailed when it comes to registering OBIEE with the Hyperion Workspace metadata tables and enabling SSO security, then suddently gets very vague when it comes to registering OBIEE Presentation Services with the EPM Web Server when you need to do it manually. I tried following the "automatic" approach of using Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.4 to host all of the Hyperion and OBIEE tools, but I could never successfully get all of the components up and running at the same time, WebAnalysis in particular always refused to start and the memory consumption of the whole stack was too much for my 2.5GB RAM virtual machine; in the end I went with the "manual" approach of having the Hyperion tools running in their own embedded Web application servers (i.e. Tomcat) and OBIEE using OC4J, this is where the documentation gets very vague and the order you do things is very important. The end result for me was that I got the basic integration working using this latter approach, but I never managed to get single sign-on working, which meant that I had to additionally log on to OBIEE when I first connected to it from the EPM Workspace.

So once it's all (more or less) up and running, how does OBIEE look when run through EPM Workspace? Well, the login screen you get is from the Hyperion world, it's a Java applet and you type in a user ID provisioned from Shared Services (like OID integration, you can set up users in Shared Services and have them work across OBIEE as well).

Once you log in, you get a Workspace page administration home page, the idea here is that the user defines workspace views consisting of reports, links to analysis, a kind of "homepage" for BI.

You get to the OBIEE components using the "ship steering wheel" button in the top left hand corner, a bit like the Office menu that you get with Microsoft Office 2007. Using this menu you can select Oracle BI Answers, Oracle BI Dashboards, Oracle BI Delivers, and Oracle BI Publisher if you've got it configured.

Clicking on these menu entries brings up new workspace pages for Answers, Dashboards and so on. There's a Hyperion theme that you can enable for your dashboards and other OBIEE components, so that they use the same visual style as EPM Workspace.

Notice how, when you're working an OBIEE dashboard, there's a new menu entry at the top of the page so that you can navigate to the other dashboards that are available. That'll be useful if you're using the BI Applications, where there are dozens of dashboards that you can access. Another neat feature is that the EPM Workspace UI provides tabs at the bottom, so that you can have multiple dashboards, Answers pages, Delivers pages etc open at the same time, and switch between them easily.

You can also access the admin screen for BI Presentation Services from the EPM Workspace. When you do this, the Presentation Server admin page is displayed in an IFRAME, so that you can update your dashboard and other preferences. A bit of a "hack" but it does the job.

Dig a bit deeper though, and it's clear that in this initial release, the integration only goes so far. You can certainly access your dashboards and so on from within the EPM Workspace, and you should be able to sign on to both sets of applications using the same Shared Services login; where the integration stops though is around things like creating new reports, integrating reports into the workspace and so on, which at the moment seems to be limited to just the old Hyperion tools such as Planning and Interactive Reporting. Notice how Oracle BI Answers or Oracle Dashboards aren't listed as reports you can create here:

Items from the OBIEE Web Catalog don't appear in any of the directories Workspace uses to source and categorize the reports it works with, these are restricted to reports created using the old Hyperion tools; I don't know if the idea is to extend this to cover the Web Catalog in the future, or indeed to properly integrate OBIEE Web Catalog content into the workspace pages and document lists that users can work with. I suspect that this is probably about as far as integration will go, with proper integration between the toolsets something that Oracle will deliver as the EPM and OBIEE suites integrate post 11gR1.

UPDATE 15/12/2008 : Well, it appears that the EPM Workspace product can be used to create new Answers reports, open Web Catalog reports and so on, see here for more details. The thing is though, I'm completely at a loss as to how to enable this feature. See the linked article for more details, and if you know how it's supposed to work, drop me a line to explain how.

Still, it's certainly interesting, and if you have gone out and bought both sets of tools, it does give you a single UI for accessing everything, and a single security system for provisioning users. There are also integration points in Smart View (the Office Add-in) and Smart Space (the gadgets feature), so in a way this is like a new, "special edition" version of OBIEE for customers looking to add some more of the Hyperion components in (see my recent Oracle Open World presentation for more details and screenshot). My understanding also is that you can also use these features even if you've not separately licensed the Hyperion tools, as they're licensed as part of the OBIEE+ package as well as through the EPM System; whether you'd want to do this though if you've not otherwise deployed the Hyperion tools is of course another question. I'd not recommend the setup to the fainthearted, it took me a while to get it mostly working, but if you're up for a challenge and have got a couple of afternoons free, it'd be worth taking a look.