OBIEE 11g Upgrade considerations

OBIEE 11g is a major leap in technology when compared to its prior version 10g. To go for newer version is a big decision, and required correct timing and planning. Following are important considerations when planning this move.

OBIEE 11g upgrade required revising hardware, annual license costs as weblogic is additional component used in 11g technology stack, and maintenance costs.

1. New installation Vs Upgrade - For companies going for Oracle BI for the first time, 11g is the only choice. Oracle is going to discontinue its dupport for 10g by Mid of 2014, so that leaves 10g implementation out of considerations.
2. Volume of published reports in current version- If the current set of reports are large, this will impact the upgrade timeframe for 11g. Managers need to plan sufficient time and budget for post upgrade bug fixes to published reports in 10g, redesign for reports that cannot be simply fixed due to change in application logic (this should be minimum), testing by development and users community.
3. Upgrade to 11g will be impacted by volume of customizations in 10g platform, like use of Java componenet for reporting.
4. Technical capabilities of administration team - 11g works on weblogic, which is pretty complex if things go wrong and need to be fixed. Although under normal circumstances, only working knowlegde of weblogic should suffice.
5. Security model - 11g has completely new security model. Catalog level and RPD level security is supported for backward compatibility only, and its recommended to migrate to weblogic based application roles based security. Depending of number of groups and users, this might be a challenge to complete
6. Retesting of entire upgrated catalog is a must - to ensure none of the existing functionality is lot.
7. Requirements for new features - if there is an upcoming project that will need integration with essbase, or has ragged hierarchies, its much better idea to upgrade before starting that project to take advantage of new features.
8. Development team and end user training - 11g interface is quite different than 10g, so some level of training is required for sure.
9. Cloud based 11g implementation - instead of installing and maintaing inhouse, implementing on a internet based cloud server might be a good option for those who dont want to maintain a in-house administration team. Although it will not be very flexible when it comes to migrations, and the model will not be cost affective when size of implementation increases.

I hope the above helps in making a choice, to read about all installation steps, please my blog post on  page below:

http://obiee911.blogspot.com/2013/01/obiee-11g-installation.html