10.1.3.3 is now available

BI EE 10.1.3.3.0 is now available for download from OTN, and should also become available on eDelivery very soon. Also releasing with BI EE 10.1.3.3.0 is the standalone version of BI Publisher 10.1.3.3.0 as well as BI Applications version 7.9.3 ("Oracle Business Intelligence Applications").

See my earlier post - Go vote! - now one can quibble whether BI EE 10.1.3.3.0 did in fact release before Aug 14 or not, because it did go RTM on Aug 14, but it takes a few days for it become available on OTN for download. But anyway...

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.3.0 is the next (semi) major release for BI EE after the release of BI EE 10.1.3.2 that happened in January this year (see posts on 10.1.3.2). BI EE 10.1.3.2.1 released in April (see posts on 10.1.3.2.1), but it was a point release with support for some additional platforms , languages, and some targeted bug fixes. BI Standard Edition One was the other big news in the world of Oracle BI (see posts on BI SE1). While this - 10.1.3.3.0 - is not as big a new release as 10.1.3.2 was, which had more than 200 new features, 10.1.3.3 is still a big enough release to warrant a celebration (or not... depending on which side of the competitive fence you are on). In brief, some of the new features in 10.1.3.3.0 are (and I am reproducing verbatim from the new features doc):

• "Oracle BI Answers-Based Metadata Dictionary Feature"
• "Multi-Select Dashboard Prompts Feature"
• "Office Integration with BI Dashboard Feature"
• "Dashboard Link Types Feature"
• "Import Oracle Catalog Feature"
• "Embedded Database Functions Feature"
• "Drag and Drop XMLA Metadata Objects Feature"

• "Oracle BI Publisher Template Builder Enhancements"
• "Flash Templates for Oracle BI Publisher"
• "Oracle BI Publisher PowerPoint Output"
• "Oracle BI Publisher Integration with Oracle BI Discoverer"
• "Performance Improvements for Oracle BI Publisher"
• "Converting Reports from Oracle Reports to Oracle BI Publisher"
• "Support for Digital Signature in PDF Documents"
• "Support for Postscript Printers"

• "Installing Oracle Business Intelligence for Microsoft Office"
• "Microsoft Office Support"

In particular, I would like to call out attention to these features:

• Microsoft Office Integration: there are snazzy new Excel and PowerPoint Add-ins that access BI Presentation Server based requests, there is the ability to copy and paste BI views from Answers or Dashboards into Office documents, the ability to generate PowerPoint output from Answers views, and support for PowerPoint (.ppt) as an output format for BI Publisher.
• Integration between BI Publisher and Discoverer: which I think every Discoverer customer shall be delighted with, as it brings to Discoverer customers the ability to create hi-fidelity layouts from your existing Discoverer worksheets (relational as well as OLAP), and lots more.
• The ability to create interactive, nice looking, offline capable Flash dashboards using the Flex builder, and populate them with data supplied by BI Publisher. Flash therefore becomes an output format supported by BI Publisher, with all the attendant benefits.
• For those more interested in the server side of things, one feature that you will like is the ability to drag and drop XMLA metadata objects in the Admin Tool.

Some useful links:

• Download the software - home page (the page URL actually says 101320bi :-)
• Download BI EE 10.1.3.3 for Windows, Linux (1.3 GB downloads, and you also get downloads for Solaris - SPARC, HP - Itanium and PA-RISC, and IBM - AIX5L)
• Download BI Publisher 10.1.3.3 (Standalone version) for Windows, Linux (the download sizes vary from 700MB - 950 MB depending on the platform you choose to download for).
• Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Documentation - home page
• Download the doc library for BI EE 10.1.3.3 (19 MB Zip file)
  
• View the doc library for BI EE 10.1.3.3 (HTML Welcome page)
• New Features Guide (HTML or download the PDF)
  
• System Requirements and Supported Platforms (PDF)