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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Financial Reporting Studio's Days Are Numbered

There has been a lot of activity going on around Hyperion Financial Reporting Studio in the past few months. In case you haven't heard, Oracle is planning to get rid of the old Windows-based report authoring tool and this change is going to be carried out quite soon. Here are the facts:
  • Financial Reporting Web Studio was introduced in the March 2016 update for PBCS and released as Patch Set Update .701 for EPM 11.1.2.4 two months later. Web Studio lacked some functionality at the time of the release but has almost reached parity with the Windows based Studio after recent updates.
  • As announced in the December 2016 update for PBCS, the desktop client is going to be replaced by this web-based solution. The switch is tentatively planned to happen in the May 2017 update of the cloud service. The same schedule is also mentioned in the Statement of Direction document recently released on My Oracle Support.
  • The readme file for FR Patch Set Update 11.1.2.4.704 informs users that support for the Studio desktop client will be discontinued in an update preliminary scheduled for mid-2017.

How does this affect Hyperion administrators using FR Studio then? First of all, you can continue using the old client and Web Studio side by side until you feel comfortable moving to the new solution. But I recommend that all users of Oracle Cloud Services (PBCS or FCCS) and those running EPM 11.1.2.4 should start familiarizing themselves with Web Studio as soon as possible. Financial Reporting has always been very picky in the sense that the client and server components have to run identical versions and this means that an update to Cloud Services will render the desktop Studio useless immediately when Oracle stops releasing an updated client. The same version requirement also applies to on-premise installations but there you will have more control over when to apply the "Studio-killing" patch (supposedly to be released in mid-2017). You can choose not to install the patch right away but it's not likely that you can postpone it forever though.

I assume that customers using EPM version 11.1.2.3 or older will not be affected by these changes as older releases have already fallen outside Oracle's error correction policies. It's still worth keeping in mind that Web Studio will be the only option when you choose to upgrade to a later release.


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