Delivering Fixed Content to Oracle Portal

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Delivering Fixed Content to Oracle Portal

• Doug Daniels Ken Barrette
• Quest Software

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Agenda

• Why is fixed content important?
• Issues in delivering fixed content
• Case Study
• Solution to the problem
• Questions answers

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Common Questions

• Cant we save money by not mailing statements to
  customers?
• How can I get the reports from my production apps
  to my remote users faster?
• How can we leverage the information in our legacy
  applications?
• Couldnt we just make all this available via the
  Web?

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Portal Deployment Issues

• Resistance to change
• Freshness relevance of content
• Getting the content to the portal
• Maintaining necessary security
• Intranet? Extranet? Both?

Successful Portals Save Real
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Give Them What They Need

• Fixed Content
• Financial Reports
• HR Records
• Customer Statements
• Invoices
• Purchase Orders
• Bills of Material
• Sales Reports

• From
• ERP, CRM other packaged apps
• Mainframe
• COLD systems

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Fixed Content Matters

• Represents a point in time
• Document is currency of a transaction
• Cannot should not be modified
• Subject to regulatory controls
• Distributed to different users, located anywhere

How Can You Get it to Your Portal?
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Technical Issues

• Modifications to the source application
• Format conversion
• Content processing
• Security integration
• Synchronization
• Version storage
• Client software requirements
• Bandwidth considerations

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User Requirements

• Cant take forever to download
• Reports can be hundreds or thousands of pages
• Still may want to print it
• Should look like the printed page
• Can I do more than just view it?
• Efficient search extract of information
• Turn static content into data for analysis
• Enable workflow collaboration
• I only want to see my favorite reports
• Let me know when a new one is available

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Why not just

• Convert everything to HTML or PDF?
• What about security?
• What if there are thousands of pages?
• How do you plan to store multiple versions?
• Implement a new application with a web front-end?
• Do you have the time and/or budget for a large,
  risky project like that?
• Build a data warehouse and give users ad-hoc
  access through the portal?
• Do you really need all users with ad-hoc query
  access?
• Some of this content should be dynamically
  retrieved
• Creates another dependency on an already
  expensive project

See our White Paper for more on this topic.
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Case Study

• Large Government Agency
• Mainframe reports
• Logistics data, Bills of Lading, Parts manifests
• Multiple geographic locations each with separate
  legacy systems
• Information from one system needed to get
  distributed to users in another location
• Strict security requirements
• Print and electronic distribution requirements

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Proposed Solution

• Database Aggregation
• Conduct complex queries to aggregate data
• Store in a single Oracle database
• Publish to the portal
• The Problem
• Failure in any of the queries meant information
  was unavailable
• Variety of systems and distributed network made
  the process error-prone

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Proposed Solution Environment
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Deliver BOL DATA to Portal
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Potential Problem
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Consolidated BOL Data
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Ideal Solution

• Deliver Reports, not Data
• Accept output from any application
• No modifications to source applications
• No applets or controls
• Multiple version storage
• Page-at-a-time delivery

• Oracle Portal Integration
• Single Sign On integration
• Supports Internet standards
• Page-level security
• Data extraction
• Collaboration
• Notification
• Personalization

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Consolidated Query Issue Resolved by Direct
Report Distribution
Deliver BOL Reports to Portal
Consolidated BOL Reports
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The Vista Plus Suite
Vista Plus Forms Automatically generate formatted
business documents
Vista Plus Output Manager Central management and
processing of print jobs and printers
ERP Interfaces Integrates with application
security models

• Vista Plus
• Enterprise report delivery, archiving viewing

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Enterprise Portal Integration
J2EE Application Server
Web-based Report Viewer
Access Management (Single Sign On)
Enterprise Output Fixed Content
Oracle E-Business Suite
Legacy Production Apps
Report Warehouse
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Snapping in the Vista Portlet
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The Vista Oracle Portlet
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Result Fixed Content Consolidation from any
source
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Other Considerations

• JSR 168 Portlet API Spec
• In final review, due September 2003
• OASIS WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets)
• Oracle Portal Partner

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The Result

• More reasons to use the portal
• Single source of consolidated content
• Leverages existing security
• Extends useful life of legacy applications
• Rich functionality for end-users
• Intranet extranet capable foundation

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http//www.quest.com/vista_plus_suite/Come see
us in booth 1002

• doug.daniels_at_quest.com
• ken.barrette_at_quest.com