For years customers have been asking me if there was a quick and dirty way of generating nice looking, graphical reports from JD Edwards World.  The easy solution was to go buy Showcase or Crystal Reports and train a couple of power users to create reports.

In my opinion this option works but both showcase and Crystal reports are fairly sophisticated tools and the learning curve was steep for an ordinary user.  On top of that, your I.T. staff would still have to do anything that was complicated.

Well, there is now an easier solution.  Oracle has recently announced that JD Edwards World will interface with Oracle BI Publisher.  If you are not familiar with Oracle BI Publisher you should become familiar with it.  Chances are you may already own it if you have the Oracle Red Stack (Oracle’s Application Server).  At any rate, Oracle BI Publisher is a very easy way to attach Microsoft Word to an XML file and begin painting a report using Microsoft Word Tables.  Any user could be trained and competant within 1 day.

The magic that makes JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne as well, work with BI Publisher is that with new release of JD Edwards World A.91, Dream Writers and World Writers can now be exported to XML.  Once the reports are exported to XML then they can attached to Microsoft Word and can be designed using BI Publisher.

Likewise, all custom RPG reports now have access to a new API that can be copied and pasted into RPG programs.  Once the programs are compiled they will produce an XML file that can be used by your users to create nice BI Publisher documents.

So your question at this point is - If I already have an RPG prgram why do I need BI Publisher?  The answer is now you can create qucik and dirty XML output files using RPG.  Your programmers can produce the basic output very quickly, and your users could then make the Report layout look anyway they would like.

Here is a quick link to some on-line tutorials for BI Publisher.