Unable to get OBIEE integration with MS-Office started

Question

After 3 painful install attempts at OBIEE 11.1.1, I now have a 32-bit simple install running on 32bit Windows Server 2008, and by adding Flash I can get all the charts to display in the SampleApp Lite that is automatically installed. I can also login to the Weblogic admin server, and the Fusion Enterprise Manager. My goal is to just test and evaluation of the MS-Office integration.
However, I can't get the MS-Office integration going. When I try to connect from the Excel 2007 BI add-in with:
---Servername = some_string
---BI Office Server = Win08forOBIEE (which is the full domain name of the server).
---Application Name = bioffice (I didn't change any defaults for the install other than the weblogic admin account which I changed to "administrator").
---Port = 80
and thence click the TestConnection button, I get the following error message:
"Test connection failed. http://Win08forOBIEE:80/bioffice/services/saw?WSDL"
On reading the OBIEE user guide, whose large Appendix D is entirely on MS-Office integration, I wonder if the server has been set to (as the user guide says) "Ensure that the administrator has granted you the Access to Oracle BI for Microsoft Office privilege. For information on this privilege, see Oracle Fusion Middleware System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition." However, according to the latter, this priviledge is granted by default to BIConsumer. Is it possible that the administrator would not have this role by default?
Also, this privilege if I understand correctly is controlled by Oracle BI Presentation Services. There seems to be 4 ways to admin Presentation Services that is swamping my understanding of which to try and how to start each (does each one only configure a certain area?):
---Oracle BI Administration Tool
---Oracle BI Presentation Services Administration
---Oracle BI Presentation Services
---Catalog Manager
I have tried starting the Oracle BI Admin Tool from the start menu > AllPrograms > OracleBusinessIntelligence > BI Administration. And ironically get a password error even though I used the same password everywhere for everything, and as described above I can sign onto everything else and the analytics can access the repository. Does the BI Office Server process by default use something different for a password than that entered for the database, the RCU, and OBIEE itself?
Thanks for any help you can provide because I'm pretty stuck.
Sincerely, Russ.

Answer 1

Some further background on my problem above:
--- I'm running both OBIEE and the repository in a VM on my PC.
--- I'm trying to use Excel add-in from the host OS on the PC. I can ping the OBIEE VM machine name "Win08forOBIEE". I can connect from a host OS web browser to the Weblogic console, middleware em, and OBIEE analytics.
--- To start Weblogic I just doubleclick C:\OBIEE\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain\bin\startWebLogic.cmd followed by windows startmenu > allprograms > oracle business intelligence > start bi services .
(Note that following the instructions and running "startWebLogic.cmd -start" with he -start parameter (followed by Start BI Services) doesn't seem to work. In fact, I wonder if the startWebLogic.cmd is step is needed at all and instead I could just use windows startmenu > allprograms > oracle business intelligence > start bi services.)
--- At the end of Start BI Services, even though I can subsequently also sign in to middleware em and to obiee analytics web pages, I get an additional browser tab popping up suddenly that starts up which says " Error 500--Internal Server Error
From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:
10.5.1 500 Internal Server Error
The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request." The URL is: "http://win08forobiee:9704/analytics/saw.dll?bieehome&startPage=1"
Any comment would be most appreciated. Thanks, Russ.