From a Boring BI Publisher Tip to a Small Comic Experiment
🕰️ Back in May 2016, I published a small Italian document with a very long title: “Integramo il BI Publisher in applicazioni di Business terze (anche) tramite URL per massimizzare l’investimento e centralizzare lo sviluppo.”
In English, that means roughly: “Let’s integrate BI Publisher into third-party business applications, also through URLs, to maximize the investment and centralize development.”
😅 Yes, the title was a mouthful. And yes, the topic was not exactly comedy gold.
🏢 At the time, I was working for Oracle, and several partners were experimenting with BI Publisher integrations. A recurring question kept coming up: how could they call reports directly, pass parameters through the URL, choose formats, select templates, and remove the BI Publisher frame when embedding reports into other business applications?
🧩 The information existed in the documentation, but it was scattered. It was not sitting neatly on a single page in the practical, “just show me what I need” format people usually want when they are building something. So I decided to consolidate the useful bits into one short guide.
📄 The practical version was exactly what you would expect: a more traditional, step-by-step Word document that partners could use when they needed the boring but precise instructions.
✨ But I have never believed that everything technical has to be boring.
🎨 So I also made a short comic-style PDF version. It explained the same idea in a lighter way: BI Publisher can accept URL parameters, those parameters can control the output, and this can be useful when reports need to be integrated into portals, third-party applications, or mobile experiences. The original PDF used a deliberately playful layout, with sticky notes, comic lettering, screenshots, speech bubbles, and a “did you know?” style introduction.
🔗 I originally shared it through a direct LinkedIn link in 2016. Later, when the content was no longer current enough to be safely reused as-is, I removed the direct download. I still liked the idea and wanted to preserve it, but I did not want people downloading a several-years-old technical document and trying to apply it blindly to modern environments.
🖼️ In 2018, I moved it to SlideShare. It stayed there for years, but at some point one of their migrations did something ugly to it. What used to be a proper document started looking like a low-resolution preview. That defeated the point, so I eventually removed it from there too.
🛠️ Now, in 2026, I am updating this old article. With the occasion, I also turned the content into an English infographic and translated the original image that accompanied it. The goal is not to pretend this is new technical documentation. It is more of a small archive piece: a preserved example of how I tried to make a dry integration topic more accessible, more visual, and a little more fun.
💡 Looking back, I still like the idea. It was a good and fun thing to do ten years ago: take something useful but boring, make it easier to consume, and give the wider community a version that did not feel like yet another internal technical note.
Italian Version
English Version
Let’s integrate BI Publisher into third-party business applications, also through URLs, to maximize the investment and centralize development
