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


8 comments:

  1. Hi, first, thank you for this helpful information, I've a question about the mail configuration of delivers with gmail, I've done all your instructions, also, I've talked with my server host provider to open port 465, but when i test the delivers of a job using mailing option, it doesn't works, is there any another configuration to do? or how can I test this is working, Thank you again for help.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Juan. The BI Publisher delivery channel configuration is straight forward.
      Server Name: Type any name you want
      Host : smtp.gmail.com
      Port : 465
      Secure Connection : SSL
      User Name: Your Gmail email account goes in here
      Password: Your gmail email password goes in here

      Save it and just to make sure changes take effect restart BIEE (not really required as the change is only applicable to 11.1.1.5.6
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    2. Thank you very much Jorge this worked like a charm and I myself was able to get BI Publisher delivery functionality back. Take Care.

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  2. Hi, First at all, thank you for your blog, it's very usefull,
    Well, I got this message in my report history:

    Fallo en la entrega.
    [INSTANCE_ID=grolmbiprd.gruporocio.com.1331929525089] [OUTPUT_ID=1352]
    Fallo al entregar el documento
    [INSTANCE_ID=grolmbiprd.gruporocio.com.1331929525089] [DELIVERY_ID=1352]Exception happened when delivery document to email::deliver API call throw ProcessingException::::Email delivery failed with Exception::Email delivery failed with DeliveryException::oracle.xdo.delivery.DeliveryException: javax.mail.MessagingException: Unknown SMTP host: smtp.gmail.com;
    nested exception is:
    java.net.UnknownHostException: smtp.gmail.com::oracle.xdo.service.delivery.DeliveryException

    I've OBIEE 11.x.5 version
    Linux Red Hat 5

    Regards

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    Replies
    1. From your comments It looks like that the issue is that from your end you do not seem to have access to the internet. Look at the message:
      "...Unknown SMTP host: smtp.gmail.com ..."

      Have you tried pinging this site: smtp.gmail.com ?
      For instance in my case i get:

      C:\>ping smtp.gmail.com

      Pinging gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com [173.194.77.109] with 32 bytes of data:

      Reply from 173.194.77.109: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=44
      Reply from 173.194.77.109: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=44
      Reply from 173.194.77.109: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=44
      Reply from 173.194.77.109: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=44

      Ping statistics for 173.194.77.109:
      Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
      Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
      Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 16ms, Average = 12ms

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  3. can you help with sharepoint integration?

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  4. this is one of the most useful blog post I have discovered, it solved my testing problem! thanks

    ReplyDelete