EPM in the Cloud is fast becoming the new normal as Oracle continues to add to its suite of Cloud products. As companies transition Planning applications to the Cloud, they often have questions about how things like existing spreadsheets, reports, and processes going to work once they migrate.
Oracle has made migrating existing Planning applications relatively straight forward using LCM and importing applications. How about your Spreadsheets? The good news is Smart View is fully available and supported with Cloud applications. The only major difference you will encounter is that the log-in is slightly different. You will see a secondary pop-up that asks for your authentication information. Once you have logged in however, you will have virtually the same experience navigating against your cloud applications that you have in an on-premise world.
One thing that you might need to take into account is that if your on-premise solution includes “Full Use Essbase” and you have users connecting to Planning databases with an Essbase connection, that is NOT available in (E)PBCS so you will need to get used to the Planning Ad-Hoc connection instead of a native Essbase connection.
With that one caveat, you might be curious about using VBA to automate your spreadsheets or perhaps you have existing VBA automation in your on-premise applications and you want to be sure that they are supported in PBCS. The answer is, for the most part, yes VBA is supported in PBCS. The best source of information is to review the Oracle Smart View for Office Developer’s Guide. For each VBA function, the supported provider type is listed. For instance, in the examples below we set certain options. If we review the Developer’s Guide we will see the following:
And from this help document we can see that the HypSetGlobalOption is supported for the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud provider.
The current version of this document is available here: http://docs.oracle.com/applications/smartview/610/SVDDD/ and you should evaluate your current spreadsheets and code against the supported features listed in this document to make sure your transition to the cloud goes smoothly.
The post Smart View in the Cloud appeared first on TopDown Consulting Blog.