SSL with Oracle Application Server WebCache and iPhone

The latest iPhone update appears to have broken some SSL-enabled OracleAS sites. We have been working through finding a solution for an Oracle Portal customer of ours and it has been fairly hairy. On at least one of the environments, we have found a solution. We can likely help if you have been having an issue with your SSL handshakes.

As part of the M&S Dynamic Oracle Portal utility, the Oracle Portal Dynamic Menu allows you to generate hierarchical links available to the visitor navigating your portal, styled exactly the way you want.

For a limited time, contact us with how you would use this solution and we will provide a single domain license of the Oracle Portal Dynamic Menu free of charge to your organization, which must have a valid Oracle Portal license.

If you use HTML Templates (Page Skins and/or Content Layouts) on your Oracle Portal implementations, you might notice that they are cached often.

If you want the results/rendering to change more often for these components, you might want to disable the page cache or tweak the webcache settings appropriately.

You may have applied or are considering applying the Oracle Application Server 10.1.2.3 patch for a variety of reasons. As a result, if you are running Oracle Portal 10.1.4 or 10.1.4.1, your Portal will be upgraded to 10.1.4.2.

Portal 10.1.4.2 New Features

There isn’t much to be found in terms of documented new features for Portal 10.1.4.2, but I understand the following to be new to this release:

• Portal Repository JSR-170 adapter
• You can now copy pages across page groups
• New HTML DOCTYPE specification

Portal 10.1.4.2 Bug Fixes

Of the many bug fixes documented for Oracle AS 10.1.2.3 and Portal 10.1.4.2, following are just a few that you might be pleased about:

• Omniportlet onclick was still opening the link in the same browser window.
• Customize/Personalize links on a portlet were accessible even after the Global Inactivity Timeout has occurred.
• When a WSRP portlet tried to upload content of size > 64k as multipart request, then an error was displayed saying > 64K is being uploaded.
• All old-style URLs may now be redirected directly to the new URL without going via the splash screen.
• More in the full article…

The Challenge

ABC, a publicly traded services and manufacturing organization, has leveraged Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to manage a variety of back-office functions, including their suppliers. Suppliers have been provided data from EBS manually by internal teams — the data sent has varied in both content and as well as format.

Internal teams spend valuable time generating reports manually for external supplier organizations and suppliers are left with the tedious process of generating their own reports. All the while, both groups may be relying on measures out of line with ABC’s priorities.

The Solution

We took a systematic approach to the issue, addressing:

1. EBS/Data
   
2. Discoverer/Reporting Logic
   
3. Portal/UI
   

The Results

Finally, by setting up proper SSO and hooks from Portal to Discoverer and integrating end-to-end all the way down into the database, users in Portal (regardless of whether they are internal or external users) see only what their user account can see. Additionally, by leveraging the latest Portal 10.1.4 features, we were able to provide ABC with a portal that had a completely customized look-and-feel matching their external website exactly.

Within days, the entire solution was architected, designed, and developed. We were all excited about the quick progress and all of ABC’s expectations were exceeded.

M&S Consulting has implemented a world-class intranet environment for a publicly traded high-tech manufacturer in California.  The implementation takes advantage of the latest Portal 10.1.4 features, while implementing rich user interfaces within Portal’s architecture.  The implementation is comprised of over 20,000 pages, including over 500,000 portal items.  The intranet is a valuable knowledge and collaboration tool for thousands of internal users.

In recognition of the solution’s success, M&S was invited to present it at Oracle OpenWorld in 2007.

Some people get excited about the prospects of running Oracle Application Server (10.1.2) on a 64-bit OS.  However, just to be clear here, even if you go through the patching to get the install completed, you will still only be running OracleAS in 32-bit mode.  

By the way, if you have reasons for really wanting to run OracleAS on a 64-bit OS, I would be interested in hearing a compelling argument.

While using SSO, in order to create a public connection to Oracle Discoverer for Oracle Applications, I suggest creating a service account (user) in EBS and marking that user for LOCAL authentication (instead of SSO).

There may not be many reasons to create a public connection in this scenario, but I did come across one recently and it is not well-documented, so I thought I would share.

Of course, with Oracle BI Discoverer (non-Oracle-Applications), connections are made by database users and creating a public connection doesn’t require any EBS changes.

Bringing together many components of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Suite, as well as Oracle Applications (via E-Business Suite), M&S is uniquely positioned to delivery immense value in a short amount of time.

M&S is designing and implementing a security, integration, and user presentation architecture with Oracle’s EBS, Discoverer, Portal, and Identity Management.

The Challenge

ABC, a facilities services company, has employed over 16,000 people in fiscal year 2008. At year end, ABC’s payroll vendor generated an enormous number of W2 documents for distribution to each employee. In addition to physically mailing the individual W2 documents, ABC desired this information be delivered through their employee Portal so the information could be

1. quickly accessed,
2. accessible 24×7 now and into the future, and
3. available in an electronic format.

The Solution

M&S devised a mechanism to generate a single file per employee based on a unique Social Security Number. Once the files were generated, they were loaded into a database inside the customer’s LAN. A web application was built to identify the user logged into the Extranet Portal, request the appropriate W2, and display it to the user securely over SSL.

The Results

Within weeks, the entire solution was designed, developed, and deployed into production, available to over 16,000 employees. Once deployed, employees immediately began logging into the Extranet Portal from around the US to access their electronic W2s quickly and securely.