Wealth Distribution

Distributed architecture, Web access, and user roles give a combination of freedom and control

By Paul Dean

Continued from page 1

From OFA reports, users can now drill to the detailed information stored in the OGL by invoking the Analysis Wizard component of the Application Desktop Integrator. Also, you can create or revise budgets in OFA and upload to a new budget in the OGL without overwriting previous iterations.

New Features and Improvements

In addition to the OGL integration improvements, other general improvements include:

Sharing documents between Analyst and Budget workstations. Previously, all reports had to be created by the Administrator, or the application had to be customized.

Improved calculation times. Solves now use the Aggregation Management facility.

Several of the Web improvements take advantage of enhancements made to the Oracle Web Developers Toolkit 6.3.2.

The document tree has been redesigned into a modern user interface that allows direct manipulation of documents via drag and drop and the use of a context-sensitive, right-mouse-button menu that allows renaming or deleting of items directly in the tree. The "Tools" section of OFA 6.3 is replaced by a toolbar containing buttons that perform many of the same functions.

Data Entry forms now use a Java table that replaces the OFA 6.3 HTML form, providing better scrolling and formatting capabilities.

Report Formatting now allows users to specify the font, font size, foreground color, background color, and horizontal alignment of data, as well as the row and column labels. Users can further format the report body by choosing whether or not to display horizontal and vertical grid lines and by selecting a row suppression method (zeros, null values, or both).

Dynamic Color Coding can be applied to individual cells according to user-defined exception rules that may specify one or two conditions. For example, on a variance report, a user might define a rule with two conditions: color cells green if they contain a value greater than 15 percent and color cells red if less than eight percent. Each FDI on the report can be associated with up to four rules. Stoplight formatting is supported.

Numeric Scaling (such as specifying Actuals be displayed in 1,000s) can be applied directly at report time (also available on Windows clients).

Ranking and exception (new in 6.3) and asymmetric reports can only be created on Windows clients but can be viewed and manipulated on the Web. Report row and column calculations, available on Windows clients, will not appear on the Web.

Language selection on the Web is now determined at run time, by the language preference specified in the browser, rather than at install. This arrangement allows easy distribution of data from a single application to users requiring different languages. Reports can now be accessed directly from other applications (through an API call) without having to start OFA - making it possible to embed live reports into portal applications.

With the performance improvements and additional Web functionality of OFA 11i, companies looking to deploy enterprisewide financial analysis, planning, and forecasting applications should take a serious look at this product.