Potential Oracle Newbie! - BI and OCS

Dear All,

We are looking at replacing our current MS Exchange 5.5 system with something else, and as a separate project implementing a BI solution for our ERP system. As Oracle has products that fit both these requirements (OCS and BI solution), I was just looking for some general feedback.

OCS - We have around 130 exchange users we would need to migrate from Exchange, as well as the various files these users have sitting around on NT shares that we would put into Oracle files. Is this a complicated thing to do? We would have consultants to help, but are not sure how long this should actually take. In this case I am meaning about the actual setup and configuration, rather than the time it physically takes the data to transfer.

BI - We are being recommended to use the Oracle Standard One database as our datastore for general users, and combine that with the Oracle Application Server Enterprise edition with Web discoverer for what we call our 'power users'. We would use the developer suite (OWB) to extract the data overnight from the ERP system.

We do not have huge amounts of BI data - around 16Gb, so does the BI solution above seem the right way to go?

For general users the Discoverer product is too expensive to deploy to everybody, and we only need simple chart reports, updated overnight. What Oracle product could we use to do that? Or would you simply create a report in Excel that refreshes when it is opened, using the Oracle data?

We do not at present have any Oracle experience, and the competing products would primarily be MS Exchange 2003 and SQL server 2000 with reporting services.

Anybody got any experiences on any of the above, good or bad?

Many thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Garry. Received on Mon Feb 02 2004 - 06:45:54 CST