Monday, January 30, 2012

BI Pubisher 11g with Gmail

About the title:
I know, actually the title should have been something like: "Configuring Gmail as Delivery Channel Mail Server for BI Publisher 11g".

Available in 11g but could be backport to 10g:
It is about a new feature in BI Publisher only available in 11g unless you request a back port to 10g - Which I understand is also possible but has to be requested as Enhancement Request through Oracle
 Support and then Shinji's team will make it possible.

Benefit:
Well, now having this available in BI Publisher 11g it is possible to configure our Gmail email account to send or deliver BI Publisher reports. This is useful for some companies which rely in such email providers and prior to BIP11g this was not possible. Also, it is useful for developers to test email delivery channel with no need to use a local company's Email Server.
Actually, this is also supposed to work for TLS (Transport Layer Security) configuration. Suffixes for me to explain here that this is the successor of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and thus improves the network communications and reduces the risk of eavesdropping and tampering. More on TLS here.
But unfortunately, at the time of this note this feature does not seem to be working. If you get it to work I would be pleased to hear about it.

Use: To take advantage of this new feature simply enter the following values:
Port : 465
Encryption: SSL


Saturday, January 7, 2012

BI Publisher 10g on Weblogic 10.3.4 : Common Error

If you are trying to use BI Publisher 10g on Weblogic Server 10.3.4 it is very likely you have missed one important step in your installation.

In the Release Notes (search for "BI Publisher Deployments to WebLogic 10.3 Require Additional Setting at Startup")
It clearly explains that we have to update the Weblogic Startup script to make WLS aware of the toplink libraries (which in the case of OC4J it is already included) for the scheduler to work:

Locate the startup script as follows:
/weblogic_home/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin/startWebLogic.sh
Add the following setting:
-Dtoplink.xml.platform=oracle.toplink.platform.xml.jaxp.JAXPPlatform 

As in the picture
This setting is required to enable BI Publisher to find the TopLink JAR files to create the Scheduler tables.