As with any packaged, on-premises suite, finding the best Identity Management products for your enterprise is a not a trivial task. This is especially true when different products from different vendors, that accomplish different objectives or services, have remarkably similar (and therefore confusing) naming conventions. To make matters worse, not unlike other COTS enterprise suites, the ‘cloudification’ of these products has begun and many vendors have started to offer a version of these products as a PaaS or SaaS offering. Additionally, many of these vendors also offer an IaaS type deployment of these packaged products in their on-prem form. M&S has … Read More
Leveraging the Power of Salesforce External Objects
Here at M&S we are working on a ground-breaking new project containing multiple data sources being brought into one Salesforce org and displayed using Visualforce with Bootstrap CSS. A crucial and challenging area of our client request involved not replicating data from external enterprise systems by storing it in a Salesforce Object (neither Standard nor Custom). This led us to the use of Salesforce External Objects. External objects are similar to custom objects, except that they map to data that’s stored outside your Salesforce organization. Each external object relies on an external data source definition to connect with the external … Read More
Migrating from Oracle Portal 10g to Oracle APEX
There are several enterprises that are currently running the Oracle 10g middleware platform for their front-end applications. They have Oracle Portal 10g or prior versions delivering content for their Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Discoverer based applications, all running on Oracle Application Server (OAS) 10g. Many of these OAS 10g environments also run Oracle Internet Directory (OID) 10g and Oracle Single Sign-On (OSSO) 10g. Oracle provides a supported and easily repeatable upgrade path for Oracle Database 11g, however, the upgrade of components running on OAS 10g moving to Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) 11g is not quite as straightforward. Oracle … Read More
Valentine’s Day Word Cloud using Oracle’s Distribution of R
We hope you had a great Valentine’s Weekend! Whether you did or not, we knew people on twitter were talking about the big day so we thought we’d do some analysis. Check out how we made this word cloud using Oracle’s Distribution of R to pull Valentine’s Day tweets from Twitter. Once you have Oracle’s Distribution of R running, you must first install the necessary packages. > install.packages(c(“devtools”, “rjson”, “bit64”, “httr”))> install.packages(c(“devtools”, “rjson”, “bit64”, “httr”)) > install_github("twitteR", username="geoffjentry")> install_github("twitteR", username="geoffjentry") Then, you must load the correct libraries. > library(devtools) > library(tm) > library(wordcloud) > library(twitteR)> library(devtools) > library(tm) > library(wordcloud) > … Read More
What I Learned From Oracle’s BIWA Summit 2015 (Perspective from a Consulting Intern)
Our Big Data Team, here at M&S, packed up their bags and headed to San Francisco last week for the 2015 Oracle Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit. Some of the major topics discussed included: Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Advanced Analytics. The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. It is becoming increasingly talked about and there are predictions of billions and billions of sensors by 2020. But what exactly is IoT? IoT involves embedded computing devices interconnected with existing internet infrastructure, such as, wearables and connected cars. Why the hype right … Read More
Managing Negative Leave Balances in Oracle EBS R12.1.3 HCM
The Challenge Managers of Oracle E-Business Suite HCM applications may wish to implement a business rule that prohibits employees from taking leave that exceeds their balance (ie result in a negative leave balance). Until now, E-Business Suite has not provided an easy way to implement that business rule, rather, users needed to write custom code for the ‘BG_ABSENCE_DURATION’ fast formula. For many users these seemed overly complicated. The Solution Beginning with E-Business Suite R12.1.3, following the simple steps below, Oracle has provided a profile option that can be set to prevent employees from taking leave that exceeds their balance. Authenticate … Read More
An Alternative to Using an Oracle BI Publisher Data Table for a One Line Table
When creating a one line table in Oracle BI Publisher using a Data Table, it will give you redundant filtering options on the titles of the table and an unnecessary subtotal at the end of the table if there is a fact in the table. Instead, we would like to have a similar table but without the filters and the subtotal. To do this we will add a Layout Grid to the dimensions that we have predefined. This will give the overall BI Publisher report a much cleaner look by removing two of the features of the data table. … Read More
An Analysis Design that will Allow Users to Create Custom Reports in OBIEE
Recently, I have been toying with the idea of having an OBIEE report that would allow the users to customize which columns would be shown in a particular report. This idea was going to be hard to execute because allowing users to customize the report that they would want to see on a dashboard would require the XML driving the analysis to change dynamically. A solution to this problem will not give the user 100% control of which columns are added to a report but it will allow them to have more control creating a report that they’re interested in. … Read More