Friday, June 02, 2006

Oracle E-Business Suite Integration Repository for 11i and Release 12i

Steven Chan posted recently on the Oracle Integration Repository (OTN password required for access) and I thought I’d give it a mention on this blog. According to the site:

The Oracle Integration Repository is a compilation of information about the numerous service endpoints exposed by the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. It provides a complete catalog of Oracle E-Business Suite’s business service interfaces. The tool lets users easily discover and deploy the appropriate business service interface for integration with any system, application, or business partner.

Oracle delivers a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exposes encapsulated business functions as well-defined interfaces, as well as a robust BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) processor. Organizations can use these tools to orchestrate business processes throughout the enterprise. To do this effectively, the business services of various applications need to be discovered, described, and documented in a uniform way and located in a single place. The Oracle Integration Repository is the solution to this problem, and much more.

The site lists the benefits as follows:

• Better integration planning
• Readily available information about your business service interfaces allows you to make informed decisions about your integration projects
• Centralized information helps you assess the impact of your integrations
• Reduced cost of implementing integrations with the E-Business Suite
• System integrators can discover all their business service interfaces in one place
• Uniformity of documentation lowers the learning curve
• Reduced Maintenance Costs
• Assurance that you are using supported public interfaces

Features include:

• Unified Repository from which all integration interface types are exposed
• Updates are automated and documented
• Single source of truth for all interfaces
• Can be searched by keywords
• Navigable either by product or by the integration standards you wish to leverage
• Powerful well-designed UI helps you to easily find the data that you are interested in
• Ability to print integration information or export to CSV file format.

Lastly the site states:

The Oracle Integration Repository is an integral part of the Oracle E-Business Suite. Over time, it will grow to include the integration capabilities of the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards family of products. Until then, you can find that information in the PeopleSoft Interactive Services Repository (located here: a PeopleSoft Customer Connection login is required to access the documentation).

In Release 12, the Oracle Integration Repository will ship as part of the E-Business Suite. As your instance is patched, the repository will automatically be updated with content appropriate for the precise revisions of interfaces in your environment. But until Release 12 is available, you can explore an on-line version of the Integration Repository for the 11i10 version of E-Business applications.

This is a really good offering from Oracle which hopefully will make life a lot easier for implementors trying to develop interfaces. I’m really interested to see how it works in R12.