I am researching the possibility of implementing Oracle's application server and internet and integrating it with the BaaN system with the following goals.

Provide a quick easy way of generating reports, graphs etc from oracle database provide on an intranet platform

Provide quick easy access to related documents and images.


Has anyone implemented oracle's application server, portal, and business reporting tools* and what luck have you had?

*(We currently use a eccletic mixture of Crystal Reports, Safari, and FRX for our 3rd party reporting tools).

We have tried to use webtop in combination with OracleIAS version 9. We were not able to get in running.

It running now with Apache/Tomcat although Oracle states that they are compliant with Tomcat.

Regards,
Han

1. Are there any advantages in using Oracle Discoverer instead of Tools like Cognos , Crystal and so on?

2. Is there any disadvantage in using Oracle discoverer together with Baan ERP (or BaanIV) ?

Thank you for any input.

Han

I was just thinking from standpoint of organizing information (for example dynamically graphing csvs generated by queries), discover reports and images/pdfs related to the particular entity/product, but now that you mentioning

Could you have webtop run on separate server running apache run the webtop and use one portlet to server to reference application ?


Are there any advantages in using Oracle Discoverer instead of Tools like Cognos , Crystal and so on?

Advantages, per processor licenses ~ 10k for portal + 10k for business intelligence for Oracle. We currently pay as much as 10k / year on one reporting tool and licenses for other reporting tools are on top of this. Using discover we only have the one time charge. So we may be able to get some really cool new functionality and overtime even save some money.

Nneilitz,

I am really not experienced enough in the web world to give you an advise.

We have choosen to use crystal because it uses the baan driver which means we only have to autorize on one level (we use table data authorization within Baan).

We did a test with discover and I know there is at least one company who can deliver a scheme in which a lot of the baan datadictionary has been made available but it still didn't solve our problem that we want to maintain the privileges on a single level.

Rgrds,
Han

Han

Could you provide me the name of the company that provides the data dictionary for discoverer?