PBCS: Financial Report Bursting to the File System

Hello blog, it's been a while. I got back from Kscope18 - Orlando last week and as usual it was a brilliant conference. My last blog entry (more than a year ago, tut-tut) was about OACS and some of the limitations. I've come back from Kscope with a completely different point of view. It's extremely good value (they're practically giving it away if you're a maintenance-paying on-prem Essbase/OBIEE customer) and the features and functionality ARE ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! I've already presented it to some of our customers and they love it. Anyway, back to the topic of this short blog entry...

I know it's old skool, but many users in the EPM on-prem world use the Financial Reporting bursting feature to burst out 100s of reports to the file system and automatically move them elsewhere for consumption. I didn't think that this was possible in PBCS but I was wrong!

If you select 'Export to external directory' in your batch definition, then the all the folder structures and PDFs get put in the inbox/outbox in one handy zip file which you can then download automagically (to coin a phrase from my colleague Mike ) via EPM Automate. Here's how it works:

In your batch you will select your bursting criteria, here I want to burst out my report for all of my stores in the Entity dimension:

You then select 'Export as PDF' and 'Export to an external directory'. Select 'ExportFolder' from the drop-down:

All the FR bursting folder structures and PDFs get put in the inbox/outbox 'Scheduler Output' folder in one handy zip file. Here is my Inbox/Outbox:

And here is my bursting output zip file in the 'Scheduler Output' folder:

You can then download the zip file manually or by using EPM Automate:

Finally, here is the contents of the zip file. All my folders and reports on one handy place ready to be moved to another location or system. Easy peasy!