Hi all,
This is a post that I have in mind to write for at least 6 months but I kept on postponing due to the project...
Back in March 2016…
Just before the half year submission development work has stopped, most of the HFM users are on holidays and the
number of support tickets is small. So, I decided that it was training time since
version 11.1.2.4 was now stable enough and an HFM Cloud migration project was
about to start.
I logged in the Oracle documentation portal and
I started going through the documents to identify any changes.
The first set of
documents that I was planning to read was the "Deployment and Installation" guides. Surprisingly,
Oracle has done a really good job and a user can find way more information comparing
to the past. I skimmed the documents in "Get Started" section and after reading the documents
in the "Best practices" sction, I focus on the installation guides. Next, I moved to the
Security documents. Oracle had released a document “Security configuration
guide” and since my understanding is that if you manage to connect to the external
AD, 10% of the project has been completed, I decided to spend most of the time in this document.
Chapter 1 is the Introduction, chapter 2 is
related to SSL, chapter 3 is SSO and chapter 4 is related to the
configuration of the User Directories. After completing chapter 4 with a relief
that nothing had changed I moved to chapter 5 which is the custom
authentication methods. I spent only a few minutes and then I thought “only a crazy
person will use such a method!!!” and move on.
Few months later...
The HFM Cloud migration project has started, the detail
design was about to signed-off, we had chosen to use SAML authentication to
connect HSS to our identity provider and everybody was relaxed and happy. Everybody? No… It seems that Oracle was not
happy with the situation of guiding users on how to fix their SAML authentication problems and they
decided to stop supporting it. As a result, we were back at point zero and we
needed to identify how to authenticate our users. Is there any solution? The
answer came from Oracle security manual… and the pages of chapter 5! I was
stubborn enough to spend two weeks to confirm that it can work and then out of
the blue I remembered what I had not properly ignored in March...
Summary
10 years ago, as a junior consultant, one of my first lessons was to RTFM... so back to the beginning!!!
Keep calm and enjoy your work.
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