Oracle BI Publisher—formerly known as Oracle XML Publisher—has been developed to support reporting in Oracle's eBusiness Applications. When Oracle acquired Siebel Systems Inc., the Siebel CRM server infrastructure relied on the Actuate Report Server to provide printable reports to end users.
With Siebel CRM version 8.1.1.0, Oracle started shipping the product to new customers exclusively with Oracle BI Publisher as the pre-integrated reporting tool. Only customers who have been using previous versions of Siebel CRM can choose between Actuate or BI Publisher. However, Oracle started phasing out Actuate as a reporting engine at the end of 2009.
The core features of Oracle BI Publisher are:
Support for multiple, heterogeneous data sources
Based on pure Java and XML
Support for different template types such as rtf or xsl
Support for multiple output file types such as pdf, rtf, xls, or ppt
Oracle BI Publisher is available either as a standalone product or as a part of...