Are you interested in using Oracle Sales Analyzer (OSA)?

Do you have one-off technical queries regarding OSA, or require longer term OSA support and technical assistance?

Do you have questions about OSA licensing and upgrade options?

Do you wish to upgrade from older versions of OSA to the latest edition?

Do you require OSA administration or end-user training?

     If so, contact Rockport Software

 

 

 Update: October 2007. Oracle have extended the support period for the OFA/OSA products. Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA) and Oracle Sales Analyzer (OSA) 6.4 will continue to have Error Correction Support until 31 Dec 2009, and Extended Support until 31 Dec 2010. OFA/OSA will be de-supported after these dates. 

(Previous desupport notices for these products had specified the end of error correction support at 31 Dec 2007). Error correction support offers continued support in the form of bug fixes, back ports for fixes, certification with new platforms and telephone support. If you have any questions about the support of these products then please contact us.

 

 

Oracle Express Server / OFA / OSA- The Future

With the introduction of Express Server technology into the Oracle RDBMS database (in version Oracle 9i) the development of Oracle Express Server as a standalone product has now been completed (Express Server version 6.3.4). Both of the analytic applications based on Express Server (Oracle Financial Analyzer and Oracle Sales Analyzer) have had final release versions (6.4.0) synchronised with the final Express Server release. All future development of analytic applications will be based on the Oracle RDBMS database rather than Express Server.

Oracle have several analytic applications based on the latest OLAP technology that customer can consider as replacements for OFA and OSA or as standalone Business Intelligence solutions.

  Bullet Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (EPB)
  Bullet Oracle Discoverer for OLAP
  Bullet Oracle OLAP
  Bullet Oracle BI Analytics

If you are an existing customer of Express Server applications, Rockport Software can provide the following services.

  Bullet Support for old versions of Express Server applications
  Bullet Upgrade paths to the final versions of Express Server applications
  Bullet Advise and assistance with upgrades to Oracle RDBMS OLAP technology
  Bullet Implementations of Oracle OLAP business Intelligence applications

Existing customers still have plenty of time to consider the future direction of their existing Express Server Applications. Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA) and Oracle Sales Analyzer (OSA) 6.4 will continue to have Error Correction Support until 31 Dec 2009, and Extended Support until 31 Dec 2010 (as of October 2007). 

Oracle Sales Analyzer (OSA) 11i version 6.4

Oracle have now released the latest versions (11i release 6.4.0) of OFA and OSA, together with the associated version of Express Server 6.3.4. The naming convention for OFA and OSA has changed to be in line with the Oracle Applications release, hence 11i.

All client development in these products by Oracle will be on the Web, so very little has changed in the Windows client to the 6.3.2 release. Oracle has made significant developments to both these products in two areas:

  ü The Web client, introducing features such as Formatting and Colour coding
  ü The application database engine, where the products can now take advantage of the huge performance increases provided by
  ü Express Server 6.3 and the new Aggregate command.
     

New Web features available in both OFA and OSA, provided by the 6.3.4 version of Web Agent include:

  Bullet Colour Coding - including Stoplight formatting, based upon Data Conditions
  Bullet Document Formatting 
  Bullet Enhancements to the web document tree, including modify, search, delete, rename & move
  Bullet Improved Printing 
  Bullet Single sign-on for better integration with Oracle Applications
  Bullet Enhanced Webcall API, which identifies selected cells in a report for drill-through analysis
  Bullet Web Startup Action API 
     

Oracle Sales Analyzer 11i

The latest release for OSA, 6.4.0 includes many enhancements:

Bullet     High fidelity export to Excel-2000/XP

Users will be able to export reports to an html format, preserving formatting. Each page of the report can be exported to a separate worksheet in the Excel workbook. A table   of contents can be generated, which provides easy access to each worksheet in the workbook.

Bullet    Row/Column level formatting on reports

Users can highlight individual rows and columns on reports and apply formatting such as fonts, background colours, and underlines, much as they can in the Windows Client interface. Reports previously formatted via the Windows Client interface will maintain their formatting.

Bullet    Ranking/exception report creation

Users can create dynamic ranking/exception reports through the Web interface, much as they can in the Windows Client interface. An example of a ranking/exception report is a report that ranks the top 10 products by most recent month’s sales for each account.

Bullet    Fit-to-page option for printing

When printing a report, users can specify that the report is to fit onto a single page, or onto a specified number of physical pages. For example, this feature allows a user to keep a report from printing a single row of data onto a second sheet of paper by specifying that the report is to print entirely on a single page.

Bullet    Print multiple

Users can highlight one or more documents in the navigation list and print the entire set, without having to open each document first.

Bullet    Control over the presentation of NA data in reports

Users can control how NA data is displayed in reports.

Bullet    Multi-select of anchor in the selector family tool

The family tool in the Web selector now supports selecting family members of multiple dimension values. For example, a user can use the family tool to select all UPC-level children of several key brands.

Bullet    Multiple strings in the selector match tool

The match tool in the Web selector now allows users to specify multiple strings to match. For instance, a user can select all product values that contain ‘can’ and/or ‘bottle’. Users can also paste into the match tool a list of match strings from the clipboard. For example, if a user creates a list of dimension values through another tool like Excel, the user can easily paste that list into the selector match tool.

Bullet    Non-numeric measures in the exception tools and sort tool

The selector exception tools and the Sort by Data tool now allow users to select text, Boolean or date type data. For example, in a database containing data on store size, a user can sort stores based on their size.

Bullet    Apply custom aggregates, custom measures or saved selections to open document

Users can now choose to apply custom aggregates, custom measures or saved selections directly to the open document upon their creation. Users can also highlight a custom aggregate, custom measure or saved selection in the Navigator, and apply it directly to the open document.

Bullet    Publishing related objects with ‘parent’ objects

Custom measures, custom aggregates, and saved selections that are contained in reports and graphs can now be automatically published with their ‘parent’ report or graph, rather than having to be published separately.

Bullet    Custom right-click actions

In order to facilitate customizations, custom right-click actions can now be associated with all documents or a specific document type (i.e. report or data entry form). A technical note is also available.

Bullet    Oracle Portal Integration

Oracle Portal is a software framework for building and deploying personalized Web sites that deliver information and applications to customers, employees, and partners. Users will be able to add portlets to their personalized portals to access reports or graphs that were created in Oracle Financial Analyzer and Oracle Sales Analyzer. They will also be able to add portlets which contain lists of documents from any Oracle Financial Analyzer or Oracle Sales Analyzer database to which they have access. Each document on the list is a link which allows the user to view the document either in a light (html) viewer, or in the application from which it came. This feature allows users to access reports created in multiple Analytic Solutions applications from a single Web site.

The original OSA 11i release improved the build process with the ability to support up to 10 dimensions per measure and the use of the Aggregate command to greatly improve the performance of data aggregation within the data loaders. These changes are also available as a patch for OSA 6.3.0

Further improvement to the OSA Web client 11i also included:

  Bullet Selection by Measure Exception
  Bullet Custom Measure and Custom Aggregate editing
  Bullet Report Catalog hook for Product Extensions
     

 

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