Top 10 items to have ready for your EPM implementation

In order to make the most of you and your implementation teams’ time, in preparation for your new EPM System installation here is a quick list of the most common items, we have found are commonly overlooked. This is specific to a Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 EPM installation:

1. Download ALL 7 of the EPM System packages, from the Oracle E-Delivery cloud (http://edelivery.oracle.com/), for your specific operating system. Other products, such as ODI, DRM and EAL, have standalone installers that require separate download and installation
2. Download the EPM System Client Installers package for 32 and/or 64 bit operating systems, depending on the mix of bitness in your user community’s operations systems. These are standalone installers for a majority of the EPM products that have ‘thick clients’. Note that FDM Workbench and IR Workbench still require you to use the main EPM System installer. In these cases you will need to ensure you have the 32 and/or 64 bit complete EPM System packages downloaded.
3. Create a domain account and assign that account as part of the Administrators group on all servers in your environment(s)
4. Synchronize Time across all servers in the environment
5. Disable UAC
6. Disable Windows DEP
7. Enable group policy “Do not forcefully unload the user registry at user logoff”
8. Assign the local policies – Act as part of the operating system, Bypass traverse checking, Logon as a batch job, and Logon as a service
9. Install the Application Server and IIS Web Server roles on all servers that will host the following products: FDM, EPMA, DRM and HFM. If you choose to integrate DRM with Hyperion Shared Services for external authentication purposes, you must install IIS on the Shared Services server and lay down the DRM installation on that server. When you install IIS, be sure to include the Management Tools and IIS 6 Management Compatibility. Most importantly be sure to enable ASP.net.
10. If you plan to use Oracle database as your RDBMS, be sure to install the full Administrator Oracle client on the machines that will host the following products: FDM, EPMA, and HFM. If you are installing on a 64 bit operating system (and we hope you are), use the 64 bit Oracle client. If you are installing FDM on a 64 bit operating system, you must install the 32 bit Oracle client as FDM does not support the 64 bit client. If you plan to host EPMA and/or HFM on the same server(s) with FDM, you must install BOTH the 32 bit and 64 bit Oracle clients. Copy your tnsnames.ora file to the ..\network\admin folder under your Oracle client(s) directory.
    

Following these simple steps will save you time, frustration, and most of all money! Make life easier on yourself and your implementer, be proactive and you should have a smooth implementation!

HFM and FDM 11.1.2.2 Upgrade Process Tips and Changes to Watch

11.1.2.2 has been out for a few months now, and we’ve had several clients with whom we have worked to perform upgrade-in-place of their 11.1.2.1 environments. Thus far, the process has been far less problematic than the previous upgrades from 11.1.2.0 to 11.1.2.1. It appears Oracle has done a great deal of work making the process more seamless and less perilous.

The upgrade process for environments with HFM, FDM and Financial Reporting does have an interesting change from previous installations. The installTool will not allow you to upgrade HFM or FR if your default DCOM settings are not correct. However it does not explicitly point out that it is not upgrading those pieces. You must expand and verify every item on your product list that says ‘11.1.2.1 Installed’. If they’re not all checked, you should see an explanation why it is not checked when you select the item in question. In this case, the installer warned that the default DCOM settings were not correct. Cancel out of the installer, and change the default DCOM setting to “Connect”. Our environment seemed to work properly before the upgrade with the DCOM default set to “None”, however 11.1.2.2 seems to want a non-granular DCOM security setting scheme before allowing you to install.

Once your installation and configuration steps are complete, FDM may have some additional work that needs to be done before it will successfully allow the Load Balance Configuration to proceed. In our case, we received an error, “Unable to create Load Balance Manager object”. We found that the domain username/password needed to be added or modified for the FDM DCOM objects. Due to a peculiarity in the way DCOM picks up changes to these objects, it was necessary to remove provisioning to the objects, including removing the “dots” from the password lines, set it to ‘The Launching User”, and close the object. We were then able to re-open it, add the correct ID/password, and get the Load Balance Configuration to proceed to the next step.

Users of previous versions of FDM will not be surprised by the need to remove/change DCOM users and permissions, but it is a good reminder to be vigilant as Oracle has changed their FDM installation procedures to better fit with their overall Hyperion installation framework. Review the documentation from the previous installation, as well as the READMEs from the 11.1.2.2 documentation, in case there are other surprises or issues that may have been resolved but forgotten since the last installation.

12 Ways Oracle EPM's New Upgrade Boosts Organizational Performance

To share knowledge and innovations around its range of products. This year more than half of the topics covered were Hyperion-related, and the big news was the OracleEPM update. Version 11.1.2.2 gives you three new products and 200 additional features that save time and labor. Here’s what they can do for your organization:

1. Your system can work 100 times faster and see more performance detail. Exalytics is like an accelerator, giving you supercomputer velocity. So whatever function your EPM is providing at the moment, Exalytics will do it faster. And you gain quality with speed: Exalytics reflects more complex, granular scenarios with forecasting functionality. You will know how a decision will affect the business instead of guessing what if?
2. Plan at the speed of business. Oracle Crystal Ball Predictor is an analytics engine now part of the planning suite. So you can access and use data outside of the planning cycle according to business needs/timing.
3. Uncover historical patterns.  Crystal Ball also performs predictive modeling. It assesses data in your system and pulls out themes that aid strategic decision making. 
4. Connect dots from present performance to future goals. Version 11.1.2.2 provides greater connection between Hyperion’s tools, offering a more seamless user experience. You can pivot from data found in Hyperion Strategic Finance to data in Hyperion Planning without missing a beat.  
5. Plan projects the same way you manage financial planning. A new module, Project Financial Planning, gives you this functionality.
6. See what customers, products, geographies are profitable. The new Cost and Profitability Analytics module gives you a cross-section view of data, so that you can make granular decisions—down to the SKU number.
7. Close your books faster. Hyperion Financial Management has added configurable dimensionality and other functionality so that you can choose the categories by which you evaluate your business. You can plan and close your books by product, customer, geography, trusting the system’s automated method of matching numbers.
8. Set up sustainability reporting. In some geographies, like Europe, sustainability reporting is mandated. In others, it’s a good corporate social responsibility practice. Either way, the Sustainability Reporting Kit in Hyperion Financial Management produces required data with minimal effort.
9. Track steps in closing cycle. Financial Management Analytics allow you to see the process in action, so you don’t have to think about unfinished steps—or data that still needs to be processed.
10. Manage XBRL tagged submissions for compliance. Hyperion Disclosure Management saves time by allowing you to tag data within Microsoft Office or the EPM system.  
11. Automatic processing of hierarchies for management and financial reporting. The Data Relationship Manager allows you to track by product, customer, geography and time. This information may be used in a business context by management, or with more specificity for financial management. 
12. Pull data into presentations, written budgets and other documents. Smart View reaches into Hyperion applications and embeds data where you need it in your workday. It works in all Microsoft Office products; Imagine how much faster and easier preparing presentations will be!

Using Life Cycle Management for Changes AND Backups

Lifecycle Management is most commonly used to promote changes from one environment to another.  However, there’s no reason that you can’t use this same tool to recover back into the same environment. With that in mind, LCM can become a terrific backup solution.
The steps are simple enough. A bit of up front work, a bit of scripting, and you will have a nightly “hot backup” that can be used to recovery almost everything from a lost app to a single report that was accidently deleted or modified.
First, we have to create the definition. From Shared Services, access LCM as you would for a live migration. Define what you want migrated (normally everything) and walk through the pages to define the migration. However, instead of selecting “Execute Migration”, you select “Save Migration Definition”. This will output an .xml file that holds the LCM export definition.
This is repeated for each item in the LCM tree (Shared Services, Planning applications, HFM applications, EPMA, Reporting and Analysis, etc.), giving each their own distinct and identifiable backup file and xml file. I recommend you keep these 2 names the same and something very obvious to the casual reader (i.e. HSS.xml, MYAPP.xml, Reports.xml, etc.). A couple of warnings here – first Essbase is not migrated via LCM – the export gets SubVars and not much else – no outlines, etc. Second, if your reporting folder structure gets too large, you will find that backup taking hours (at one point I saw it approach 24 hours). If this happens, break it into several backups, one for each reporting folder (i.e. Reports-FolderA, Reports-FolderB). For this approach to work, you will need to severely limit or keep reports out of the root folder altogether.
Now that you have migration (or backup) definition files, you need to get an admin-level encrypted password into them. Otherwise you’ll be asked for username / password every time they are run, making them useless as an automated backup. I always use the ‘admin’ account. It is an automated process and should have all the rights required for the backup. It is also a “known value” that won’t change.
Login to the Shared Services server, make sure you place the xml file somewhere local on that server and set up a backup directory. Once you have done this, run the LCM tool from the command line. You can run it on either Windows or UNIX – it works the same way. In a Windows environment, the command would look something like this:
D:\Hyperion\common\utilities\LCM\9.5.0.0\bin\utility.bat <xml file name> -local -b <backup directory>
You will be prompted for username and password. Once you provide them, they will be encrypted and placed in the .xml file, so that you won’t be prompted again. Repeat this process for each xml file.
Now you’re ready to script. Use a scripting language you are comfortable with, that works on the OS you are going to use. My most commonly used are Perl, Bash, and (reluctantly) windows CMD scripting.
You can make the script as intelligent or as simple as your needs require. Some basic steps would be:

1. Make sure the backup directory exists
2. Clear / move / delete previous backups in that directory
3. For each xml file found, run the utility.bat like was done manually above (you’ll want to capture both normal output and error output to a log file)
4. I always zip of the output directory to save space and also to make it easier to move to an archive location.

Note –You will need to use 7zip on a Windows system because of limitations of normal Zip and the requirements to zip up Reporting and Analysis directories.
Some more advanced steps would be to kick off the LCM backups in parallel, email upon error and/or completion, test for older backups and remove any that are more than a week / month old. These are nice, but not central to the basic steps – as I said, you can make this as simple or complicated as your needs dictate.
Test the script a few times manually; keeping an eye on the time it takes to run.  If you get the results you expect, you’re ready to schedule this nightly. There is no downtime required. Keep in mind, however that this will impact system performance, try to schedule it when there aren’t competing processes (consolidations, data loads, etc.).
Finally, a backup is only good if you can actually do a recovery with it. Make sure you use the backup to recover some sample data and verify it. If you’ve zipped the backup to a file, unzip it to the import_export\<user> directory (otherwise just copy the outputted LCM application directory for one backup to that location). Open Shared Services and make sure you can select items for import. To be completely certain it’s working, move a sample item (i.e. a report) to another name and actually perform the import for that item. Verify the imported item matches what it should be from the time of backup.
There is a side benefit from this process. When it comes time to promote changes to a new environment, you already have an export ready to go from the last backup. This may not be the most efficient way to promote a single form, but works great when the promotion is more comprehensive.

DRM Architectures

Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) 11.1.2.2 allows DRM components to be distributed across multiple servers in several configurations to provide isolation and enhanced scalability.  The available architectures include:

• Default - Single Host
• Secondary Engine Hosts
• Secondary UI Web Servers
• Secondary API Adapter Hosts

The default architecture installs all DRM components on a single host; the distributed architectures disperse DRM components across multiple hosts to provide increased resource to individual DRM applications and processes.  This article with provide an overview of the available architectural options; future postings will drill down into the implementation details of the individual designs.

Default Single Host

A default single host installation implements all DRM components on a single server.
Minimum DRM Component Requirements

• DRM Application Server (1)
• DRM Management Console (1)
• DRM Web Server (Requires IIS Server) (1)

Optional DRM Components

• Oracle Hyperion EPM Foundations services must be available to implement DRM External Security
• API Adapter

All client UI connections to the DRM application pass through the host DRM Web Server.
If implemented all DRM API (Web Service) connections pass through the host API Adapter.

Secondary Engine Hosts

A DRM Secondary Engine Host installation implements an additional DRM Application Server component on a second host machine.   This architecture allows individual DRM applications to execute on distributed hosts under the control of a single DRM Management Service.

Minimum DRM Component Requirements

• DRM Application Server (2)
• DRM Management Console (1)
• DRM Web Server (Requires IIS Server) (1)

Optional DRM Components

• Oracle Hyperion EPM Foundations services must be available to implement DRM External Security
• API Adapter

Client UI connections pass through the Primary Host DRM Web Server and are routed to the Application Server where the requested DRM application is attached.
If implemented all DRM API (Web Service) connections pass through the host API Adapter.

Secondary UI Web Servers

A DRM Secondary UI Web Server Host installation implements an additional DRM Web Server component on a second host machine.   This architecture allows individual DRM applications to execute on distributed hosts under the control of a single DRM Management Service.
Minimum DRM Component Requirements

• DRM Application Server (2)
• DRM Management Console (1)
• DRM Web Server (Requires IIS Server) (2)

Optional DRM Components

• Oracle Hyperion EPM Foundations services must be available to implement DRM External Security
• API Adapter

Client UI connections pass through the Primary Host DRM Web Server and are routed to the Application Server where the requested DRM application is attached.
If implemented all DRM API (Web Service) connections pass through the host API Adapter.

Secondary API Adapter Hosts

 A DRM Secondary API Host Server implementation installs the DRM API Adapter component on a second host machine.   This architecture routes custom DRM API application web service clients through the Secondary API Adapter host instead of the Primary (or Secondary) DRM Application host.  The Secondary API Adapter host executes on distributed hosts under the control of a single DRM Management Service.
Minimum DRM Component Requirements

• DRM Application Server (2)
• DRM Management Console (1)
• DRM Web Server (Requires IIS Server) (1)
• Oracle Hyperion EPM Foundations services must be available to implement DRM External Security
• API Adapter (1)

Client API connections pass through the Secondary DRM API Adapter Host and are routed to the Primary Application Server where the requested DRM application is attached.