Mobile BI – User management and licenses aligned

With an increasing number of Oracle BI Mobile customers, the questions of correct licensing and security configuration reach us more often. We will give you a summary which usual licenses are available and which settings you should take a look at. Please be aware, that our hints are not legally binding.

In the Oracle Technology Global Price List Oracle BI Mobile is not listed as an option to the Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), but as a separate product in the Oracle Business Intelligence Stack. Even though you can think of it as an option, because it is licensed additionally to your existing OBIEE contract. When the number of licenses differ, the rest of our post should be interesting.

There is at least one other license which allows to use Oracle BI Mobile. That’s Oracle BI Foundation Suite, which is a bundle of OBIEE, Oracle Essbase, Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management and Oracle Essbase Analytics Link. Having that will release the need of distinguish between Oracle BI Suite users. Still there are some thoughts thinking about.

Off-topic: To increase the security of an enterprise infrastructure and data, we encourage you to evaluate the Oracle BI Mobile Security Tool Kit. This product will allow the integration of Oracle BI Mobile with the Mobile Device Management solution of your choice.

Example

Let’s imagine an OBIEE customer who already has 100 OBIEE licenses. 50 additional Oracle BI Mobile licenses were bought. Now the customer must ensure, that only those 50 users use the option, and no other has access to it.

Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition	Oracle BI Mobile
100 licenses	50 licenses

Security settings

To limit the access a proper security concept must be in place. Concept sounds huge. Basically there are three necessary steps:

1. Security provider settings

In the first instance in the security provider groups or user must be filtered to the 100 users having access to OBIEE.

2. Application role

Create a new application role in the Enterprise Manager. Afterwards assign only the users and groups to it, which will have access to Oracle BI Mobile.

3. Feature restriction

One option on the Administration page in OBIEE is “Access to Mobile” (https[s]://[server][:port]/analytics/saw.dll?PrivilegeAdmin). This option will limit the access to the functionalities, means apps, for mobile access.

The default value is BI Consumer Role. Members of that role are all 100 users filtered in the security provider in the example. To make the easily comprehensible, remove the role and assign the one created early. By this only a subset, the assigned 50 users, will have access.

Keep in mind to regularly check the count of members assigned to the role. You can also create a dashboard to keep the role members in sight. We’ll show that in a later post.