Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BI Publisher, formerly XML Publisher) is an enterprise-level reporting tool that separates the data from the presentation. This means that the IT department can define the data sources, and power users can specify the report layout using tools like Microsoft Word. The same data source can be used by multiple report templates. BI Publisher is built to be able to handle thousands of documents per hour.

The defined reports are stored in a report repository (in the file system or in a database). BI Publisher supports scheduling, can archive report output and deliver via many channels, including WebDAV and email.

By separating the task of finding the data from the task of deciding how to present them, the business user can define a report template with exactly the format he or she wishes.

BI Publisher Layout Templates

BI Publisher supports the following layout types

Template Type	Detailed Information
RTF Templates	The majority of all BI Publisher templates are RTF templates Very popular because end users can change the format in Microsoft Word An Microsoft-Word Add-On - the Template Builder for Word is available in the BI Publisher Desktop application
PDF forms	PDF forms can be modified to map XML data fields to PDF form fields Government forms are often provided as PDF forms and can be easily fille out with BI Publisher.
Flash Templates	Adobe Flash templates can be used to format data in an interactive attractive way. The creation of Flex templates requires a flash development environment such as Adobe Flex Builder
XSL-FO Stylesheets	The XSL-FO engine is one of the major engines BI Publisher converts RTF documents into XSL-FO stylesheets and allows to insert XSL-FO commends into RTF templates. Hence there is less need to code the complete stylesheet manually. Third party XSL-FO editor can be used to create XSL-FO stylesheets for BI Publisher

Deployment Options

BI Publisher is available in the following deployment options.

• BI Publisher Enterprise Server (standalone reporting server)
  
• Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Suite
  
• Oracle BI Publisher (XML Publisher) integrated in Oracle E-Business Suite
• Oracle BI Publisher integrated with Siebel Systems
• Oracle BI Publisher integrated with Peoplesoft

Version History

The latest release version of BI Publisher is 10.1.3.4.1

The product was originally released as part of Oracle E-Business Suite as XML Publisher.
When the product became part of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition it was
re-branded as Oracle BI Publisher.


More Info
Some links for BIP/XMLP related information.