This chapter provides upgrade impact information for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Release 7.4 to BRM 7.5. It describes the feature changes that affect your BRM system and what you must consider when you upgrade from 7.4 to 7.5.
For information on planning your upgrade implementation, such as setting up your development and test environments, see "About Upgrading BRM Releases".
The following are the changes made to AAA Gateway in BRM 7.5.
BRM 7.5 no longer supports AAA Gateway Manager. You must now use Oracle Communications Service Broker (OCSB) Online Mediation Controller instead. You can also use Online Mediation Controller to interface with IMS networks, or you can use RADIUS Manager. Support for RADIUS Manager was added in BRM 7.5 Patch Set 9.
For more information, see the following documents:
Oracle Communications Service Broker Concepts Guide
Oracle Communications Service Broker Online Mediation Controller Implementation Guide
These documents are part of the Oracle Communications Service Broker 6.0 documentation set.
The following are the changes made to Customer Center in BRM 7.5.
In earlier releases, the correct product validity period was not saved in the BRM database when doing product customizations. This issue is now fixed and Customer Center now passes the appropriate values for the unit and offset fields to the subscription and registration opcodes.
The following are the changes made to invoicing in BRM 7.5.
The invoice document now displays the breakdown of usage charges, including the gross usage charges and applicable discounts and taxes. For example, if the net usage charge is $355.08, the invoice document displays the breakdown as:
Gross Charge: 348, Discount: (25.20), and Tax: 32.28.
Previously, the pin_inv_doc_gen utility displayed an error message when the InvoiceList.xml file listed more than 14 account and bill unit pairs. Because the InvoiceList.xml file can now list more than 14 account and bill unit pairs, the utility no longer displays an error message.
For more information on generating invoices by using BI Publisher, see "Generating BI Publisher Invoice Documents for a List of Accounts" in BRM Designing and Generating Invoices.
The following are the changes made to Pipeline Manager in BRM 7.5.
In previous releases, you could map multiple Pipeline Manager service codes to a single BRM service type. However, you could map only one event type to a single BRM service type. This implied that you could map only one event type to a Pipeline Manager service code. For example, to rate GSM usage events, you map the Pipeline Manager service code TEL to only one event type, /event/delayed/session/telco/gsm.
Now, the one-to-one event type and service type mapping restriction has been removed. You can now map multiple event types to a single service type to rate multiple events for a service. For example, to rate GSM and GSMTEL usage events for GSM Telephony service, you can map the /event/delayed/session/telco/gsm and /event/delayed/session/telco/gsmtel event types to the /service/telco/gsm/telephony service type.
For more information, see the discussion of mapping events to services in BRM Setting Up Pricing and Rating.
The following are the changes made to system administration in BRM 7.5.
BRM no longer supports Transactional In-Memory Object Store (TIMOS) DM. To cache a subset of BRM data in memory, you must now use In-Memory Database (IMDB) Cache Manager.
The following describes the differences between a BRM system with TIMOS DM and a BRM system with IMDB Cache Manager:
In a BRM system with TIMOS DM, BRM objects from the BRM database are cached in the TIMOS DM reference object cache (ROC). TIMOS DM handles all of the database operations in the TIMOS DM ROC. In this setup, all client requests for authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) flow through TIMOS DM. Requests for all other data, such as billing and customer service representative (CSR) operations, flow through Oracle DM and are forwarded to the BRM database.
In a BRM system with IMDB Cache Manager, the ROC technology used in TIMOS DM is replaced with the Oracle IMDB Cache. BRM objects from the BRM database are cached in the Oracle IMDB Cache. The Oracle IMDB Cache caching agent handles the database operations in the Oracle IMDB Cache and sends requests for data that is not stored in the Oracle IMDB Cache to the BRM database. In this setup, all client requests (AAA, billing, CSR, and so on) flow through IMDB Cache DM (Oracle DM is not used).
For more information, see the discussion about IMDB Cache Manager in BRM System Administrator's Guide.