Administration Maintenance Planning
Amy O’Neel, InfoSol Inc.
Keeping things running smoothly, making sure security is in place, providing support, training the user community, assessing future trends, being everything to everyone at all times. So many hats! And most BusinessObjects administrators don’t even have the luxury of having this be their only role. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. With a little planning, some tools in place, some automating and some help in your back pocket, you can do this!
Chaos Containment: Streamlining the BI Environment
Fred Walther & Peter Warren, APOS Systems Inc.
What is the cost of chaos? BI must balance efficiency with effectiveness, and the dramatic growth in BI content can become a barrier to this balance, and cause chaos and disorganization as it grows. Streamlining the BI environment and its content is a critical step in achieving success in system management, system migration, data governance, and regulatory compliance initiatives. BI has taken its place as the central enterprise decision-support system and its impact on competitiveness has become critical, but platform managers and administrators are in danger of being overwhelmed by increased volume and complexity of content. This session will discuss primary challenges that come from system disorganization and content overload, covering use case scenarios to understand strategies and technologies that can be utilized to streamline the SAP BusinessObjects environment.
BusinessObjects Migration: Differences between XI3.1 and BI4.x
Amy O’Neel, InfoSol Inc.
Every major version gets a little different. Lessons are learned. Drawing boards are reinvigorated. Calculation Engines are tweaked. Security is revamped. This will cover bare bones what you need to know for how your current investment in 3.x will change in the move to 4.1. Real-world examples of migration security issues and report testing remediation will be discussed along with guidelines to planning for what’s in store in the move to 4.1 SP5.
Getting the most from the Auditing Environment on the BI 4.0/BI 4.1 Platform
Evan Davies, Safeway Inc.
There have been a number of significant changes related to how activities are audited on the BusinessObjects platform between the XI 3.1 and BI 4.0/BI4.1 releases. This session will review the major changes as well as focus on how to get the best value from your audit database. Main topic areas will include:
- How an effective auditing strategy can provide a complete understanding of you BI 4.0/BI4.1 operating environment as an aid to effective administration
- Details of the architecture changes and configuration options
- Review how best to get data from your audit database (including a sample audit universe and reports)
- Best practices in managing your auditing environment
LCM
Minith Patel, InfoSol Inc.
With the introduction of BI 4.0 Migration of contents between BO environment has been made easy. We will go over the basics of Promotion Management, Version Manager and Visual difference. In doing so we will also point of out the best practices and how it all works behind the scene. Also we will show other available 3rd party tools and how they stand out against BO.
Real-time BO Universe to Cloud Data Sources
Sumit Sarkar, Progress Software
The explosion of Cloud Data Sources such as Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, Marketo, Eloqua, etc are disrupting BI infrastructure; and business sponsors are turning to one-off BI solutions further fragmenting reporting capabilities. Learn best practices and common gotchas for SAP Business Objects shops looking to establish robust connectivity from Single or Multi Source Universes to cloud data; and take back control of future BI projects. With the Universe, learn how to create a direct and real-time connection to all business systems across the enterprise and in the cloud. Leverage existing skills and infrastructure to consume cloud data; and establish your group as the thought leader on cloud data sources. Discussion is focused on cloud connectivity achieved with ODBC3 relational sources with third party ODBC drivers from leading vendors in the space.
Streamline and Enhance Your SAP BusinessObjects Administration
Sebastien Goiffon, CEO of GB & Smith
Several case studies
- Keep control and save time setting up BO security
- Promote, backup and recover all BO objects
- Audit, explore the BO metadata and optimize migrations
Plus introduction to :
- Automated report tests
- Administration Intelligence
UDT vs IDT – Why and When?
Jean-Francois Cayron, Sagitta BI
The question whether to use UNV vs. UNX in a Business Objects deployment is asked many times, and is the source of considerable confusion. We will cover the pros and cons of moving to the new technology, the differences between the formats as well as their respective tools, and we will wow the developer with the great features of the IDT. Also, you will see how to convert UNVs to UNXs, and the implications of taking that path. After this session, you will be able to make an informed decision about the future of the Universe(s).
Understanding What is Happening on Your SAP BusinessObjects System
Evan Davies, Safeway Inc.
What activities are really happening on your BI platform? How can you find out who is doing what? What reports are being used the least/most? This session will provide you with the insight to best understand the scope and use of your SAP BusinessObjects system to enable you to make the best informed decisions for system deployment/migration activities. The main topics will include:
- What are the main components of you r SAP BusinessObjects system and how are they related to each other?
- What tools are delivered with SAP BusinessObjects to provide gain a better understanding of the system? (Query Builder, Auditing, Monitoring)
- The use of third party tools to assist in the full system audit (360eyes)
- Ongoing administration management best practices
Users and Groups and Access Levels (Security in BO)
Minith Patel, InfoSol Inc.
The basic essential setup for any BO environment starts with setting up the User, Groups and Access Levels. In this session we will go over the bare essentials of how to create access levels, best practice to setup security and available options to customize user groups.
UNX Adoption Planning
Fred Walther & Peter Warren, APOS Systems Inc.
The new UNX universe has been established as the path forward for the semantic layer on the SAP roadmap, but many organizations are just beginning the adoption process. While migration to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 does not require adoption of the new UNX universe immediately, it’s really a matter of when and how to adopt the UNX. This session will cover various facets of UNX adoption planning, including new capabilities of the UNX semantic layer, UNX architecture, changes to security settings, challenges in UNX adoption, adapting existing content to utilize the new semantic layer, and strategies and technologies for overcoming UNX adoption challenges.
What Apache Can Do for BusinessObjects
Amy O’Neel, InfoSol Inc.
Apache is a free, open-source tool that can change the way you see BusinessObjects. Would you like to speed up your user’s experience of BI LaunchPad? Do you need to redirect from an external host ip address to an internal BusinessObjects server? Do you want to test the load on your servers to fine tune cache settings? Are you looking at software-based load-balancing between cluster nodes? Let’s take a look at this patchy software with real-world Apache implementations with BusinessObjects and discuss how they might apply to your environment.
Capitalizing on a Migration to Build Better Business Value – The Safeway Migration Experience
Evan Davies, Safeway Inc.
How can you use the migration process to bring improved business visibility into the enterprise reporting platform and help drive a broader business intelligence strategy? This seminar topic will review how the Safeway Enterprise Business Intelligence team put together a migration plan and implementation strategy that brought stability and productivity to the enterprise reporting platform and details the challenges faced and how they were resolved.
The seminar will last one hour and will focus on the migration from the 15 year old Crystal platform to the new Crystal Reports Server 2013 System. Essentially this will cover:
- The analysis of the existing Crystal Enterprise 9 platform and the dependent infrastructure
- The processes involved in conducting a detailed report analysis to determine migration priorities
- The redefinition of the Crystal Platform to more closely match the Safeway business organization
- Key migration decision points and how they were addressed
What next? How the Crystal deployment fits within the EBI strategy and an overview of future development plans.
Breaking Free from the CMC: The Next Generation of BI Platform Management
Atul Chowdhury, Infolytik
BusinessObjects specialists wrestle each day with a stable of utilities – Promotion Manager, Version Manager, Upgrade Management Tool, CCM, CMC – hoping to tame the unwieldiness of SAP’s latest release of the BI platform. Rather than answer the needs of the business and spend their time in higher-value initiatives delivering new capabilities around analytics, visualizations and Big Data, they spend nights and weekends verifying reports, performing upgrades and tracking performance problems.
In this session, attendees will learn of faster and more effective ways to manage their BI platform using both free and third-party solutions that will help them:
- Reduce risk and increase efficiency of managing platform security
- Identify bottlenecks/performance issues in their environment
- Visualize data and metadata changes across their universes/unx and reports and help accelerate upgrades, patches and object promotion
Address Cleansing in Data Services
Doug Evans, InfoSol inc.
In this session we are going to explore Data Services abilities to cleanse address information. We will look at how the USA Regulatory Address Cleanse transform takes as input any address information and matches that, using different engines, against an Address Dictionary to parse, standardize, correct and append information to your customer and operational data.
Data Profiling in Data Services
Doug Evans, InfoSol Inc.
While SAP Information Steward is the primary tool for data profiling, technical data profiling can actually be done directly in Data Services. In this session you will see through demonstration how you can go beyond simple viewing of the data to actually conducting a thorough analysis of your data. This in turn provides you with great information to building better jobs in Data Services. You will see how the data profiling process will produce a statistical analysis that includes Frequency Distribution, Distinct Values, Null Values, Minimum / Maximum Values, Data Patterns, Comparisons of values between data sets and Drill-down capabilities to view specific records.
Using the SAP RESTful SDK without a Single Line of Code
Don Collins, Connected BI Solutions
The SAP BI RESTful SDK is the next-generation application programming interface (API) for gaining insight into reporting content on your SAP BusinessObjects Server, especially for Web Intelligence reports.
But the exciting thing — and little-known secret — about the RESTful SDK is that strictly speaking, it does not require you to write a single line of code.
Based on customer experience, this session will demonstrate how developers and non-developer alike can leverage the feature-rich SAP BI RESTful SDK to gain quick insights into their SAP BusinessObjects environment using no more than a combination of freely available tools and applications we are already familiar with, such as Microsoft Excel. Attendees will be able to answer such questions as: How many Webi reports do we have and what are they? What universe objects does my Webi Report use? And what universe objects and folders are contained in my Universe? This session will allow you to harness the power of the programming world and open your use of the RESTful SDK to new possibilities.
What’s the Scoop on Multi-Source Universes?
Allan Williams, Manitoba Public Insurance
Business Objects 4 introduced the concept of multi-source universes creating a single universe with connections to different database platforms. This presentation will illustrate creating a basic multi-source universe from scratch. In addition, important considerations for configuring the Adaptive Processing Server to support multi-source universes will be covered
BI 4.1 Upgrade: 3rd Time is a Charm?
Tammy Datri, Grane Healthcare
Hear about Grane Healthcares Odyssey through their BusinessObjects EDGE upgrade from BI 3.1 to BI 4.1. This session will review the challenges, obstacles, roadblocks and setbacks that they experienced in the process of doing the upgrade themselves. What worked? What didn’t work? What resources did they use? What advice would they give to anyone who is facing a similar upgrade to the new 4.1 platform?
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