This post is more technical and will drill down into the various Enterprise artifacts that come with the Foundation Pack.
The first are the Enterprise Business Objects (EBO). There are about 30 of these in v2.01 but new ones will be added in subsequent releases. EBO’s are define for Customer, Supplier, Invoice and other common business artifacts.
Each EBO contains all of the attributes necessary to describe the particular object. As mentioned previously Oracle has researched multiple applications to come up with just about every attribute possible for a best-of-breed capability. These attributes are described in XML using an XML Schema Definition (XSD) file.
Using EBO’s provides several clear benefits:
EBO’s eliminate Point to Point Duplication- P2P works when connecting two systems but requires a complete re-implementation when you introduce a second service provider / requester
EBO’s support a One to Many Model – For Integrations that map one service request to many service providers (or vice versa), EBOs allow re-use of initial implementation and reduces overall number of transformation maps to generate
EBO’s are Hot Pluggable- Common Objects abstracts application service providers from service requesters and centralizes routing and mediation which allows any application to plug into the integrated process flow
EBO’s provide standards based content to drive interoperability- EBOs are based on the Open Applications Group content known as OAGIS and have been extended to incorporate best-of-breed attributes.
But what if you need something that is not in the provided EBO for Supplier, as an example?
AIA provides a construct for customizing the EBO which will survive future upgrades.