OBIEE 11.1.1.7 has been released by Oracle and features more than two hundred enhancements. As we’ve been reviewing these new features, it is exciting to see how quickly Oracle is zeroing in toward “Big OBIEE” by continuing to improve integration with Hyperion, Essbase, Endeca, and BI Publisher. On top of this, there are also many new UI and Mobile features.  Check it out!

 Sample of “What’s New” in 11.1.1.7

The new release of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, Release 11.1.1.7, features more than two hundred enhancements, designed to add new functionality, improve performance, and deliver an enhanced end-user experience. Some of the major new features and enhancements are:

1. New  UI Features:

a. New graphs: Performance Tile, Waterfall, and 100 percent stacked bar

OBIEE 11.1.1.7- New Features - tile, stacked bar graph, waterfall chart

b. Breadcrumbs: a feature taken from Endeca, OBIEE now provides contextual awareness and navigation. Breadcrumbs have been added to help users understand their current location within Oracle BI content and the path that they have used to navigate Oracle BI content. Breadcrumbs display at the bottom of the page, and users can click a breadcrumb or the breadcrumb overflow button to navigate to a specific location on their breadcrumb trail.

c. Anchoring headers: for tables or pivot views, a new “Freeze Header” feature,  allows you to freeze a column at an edge (top or left) of a dashboard layout.

d. Sizing Dashboard layouts: additional options that allow more control over the position and size of columns and sections in a dashboard page.

e. Visualization Suggestion Engine: suggests to the user a chart type best suited for the display of current data and the analysis task they wish to perform. An algorithmic engine evaluates data types and the cardinality of the result set to recommend the most optimal visualization.

f. Improved Export to Excel: export an entire dashboard or just a single dashboard page to Microsoft Excel.

g. BI Publisher: Report Wizard enhancements, Layout Editor Extensions for Interactive Viewer, improved Data Model Editor usability, and private JDBC connections are now supported. XML and CSV formats can be configured as “local sources”.  Integration with enterprise applications has also been enhanced with the ability to convert an E-Business Suite catalog to BI Publisher. E-Business Suite Flex Fields are now supported as BI Publisher Report parameters.

2. New  Integration Features:

a. Smart View for Office:  Oracle BI Office add-in is being phased out, replaced by the Smart View 11.1.2.2 add-in as the primary Office application for Oracle BI Foundation. Both are still available with OBI 11.1.1.7.  Users now can access the Oracle BI Foundation Catalog in Smart View, add dashboards and analyses, create new analyses from scratch in Excel, and save them as either Excel worksheets or back in the Oracle BI Foundation Catalog.

3. New  Mobile Enhancements

a. All new 11.1.1.7 visualizations are touch enabled and support gestural interactions. Double-tap on a view renders it in full-screen mode.

b. Enhancements to email settings now allow users to email attachments in the PDF format also.

Looking for more information about the features in OBIEE 11.1.1.7? Check out the Oracle Blog here for their write-up on the new features. And as always, if you have any questions feel free to contact us!


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