Adam Lange, A. Lange Consulting LLC.

Adam Lange is a reporting and analytics consultant with a passion for data. He has worked mostly in higher education where he specializes in BusinessObjects solutions.

Allan Williams, Manitoba Public Insurance

Allan Williams has 13 years’ experience managing all aspects of SAP Business Objects implementations. (i.e. Universe Design, Administration and Report Development) and is currently employed at Manitoba Public Insurance as a Senior Analyst responsible for the Business Objects reporting infrastructure for the corporation.

Amy O’Neel, InfoSol Inc.

Amy is certified as a BusinessObjects Certified Professional.  In her 13 years with Infosol, Amy can often be found providing client installations and migrations, as well as universe, report and dashboard design. In addition to BusinessObjects products, she is well-versed in Version Manager, 360View/Plus/Eyes, Infoburst and other 3rd-party tools. Recently, Amy performed site use and performance audits at City of Calgary, WebCor, Loyolla Marymount University and Comdata, developed well-used dashboards for BP Alaska and McHenry College and trained users and administrators at Intel and BP Alaska. Amy admits her greatest passion is for process improvement in whatever form it may take and she loves to throw in extra value to every project.

Atul Chowdhury, Infolytik

Atul’s worked in the Business Intelligence space for over 15 years, having played critical roles in the planning and deployment of global, mission critical BI landscapes for a number of marquee organizations including SAP, Medidata Solutions, Credit Suisse and Pfizer. With a passion for simplifying complex tasks, he founded Infolytik in 2009 to help streamline data, people and processes.

Bryan Baca, InfoSol Inc.

Bryan Baca joined InfoSol in 2006. As InfoSol’s product support manager, Bryan works with InfoSol customers around the world providing BI solution support, education and project management.

Carrie Stengel,World Wildlife Fund

Carrie Stengel is a Data Visualization Specialist at the World Wildlife Fund who turns data into arguments for change. Prior to joining WWF Carrie worked on wildlife trade issues with the NGO TRAFFIC. Her background is in conservation, with a BA in Anthropology and a MSc in Primate Conservation that lead her into mapping and visualization. When she can get off her computer she goes for a hike with her dog Buster.

David Behr, United Surgical Partners International

David Behr is a BI leader with a diverse background spanning 15 years in BI Solution Development, Management Reporting, Project Management and Operational Analytics and is focused on bridging the gap between technical and business teams to solve business problems and build actionable BI solutions. He spent 10 years with Amerisource-Bergen, a Fortune 20 company and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical services companies, building out their BI platform. Spent close to 3 years with Rent-A-Center, a Rent-to-own industry leader with of over 4,000 stores within the USA and Mexico, tearing down their current BI infrastructure and rebuilding a more efficient and effective platform. David currently works at United Surgical Partners, who own and operate more than 200 Acute Care Surgery facilities, building out Business Intelligence from the ground up.

Daylon Hunt, Mutual of Omaha

Daylon Hunt is a Financial Systems and Reporting Manager who has been with Mutual of Omaha Bank for almost 4 years.  With over 10 years experience working directly with data management and financial modeling, he now manages these processes for the Bank while overseeing the migration and implementation of Business Objects.  As a startup Bank, the initiative has been to sunset various legacy reporting tools from multiple different Bank acquisitions, and adopting in new processes and reporting applications using best practices.  With the increasing demand for compelling data visualization’s, Daylon has built several online Dashboards and is constantly striving towards delivering actionable and innovative reporting and avoiding the cursed DRIP (Data Rich Information Poor).

Don Collins, Connected BI Solutions, Inc.

Don Collins has been pursuing the limits of technology ever since he programmed his first video game on a Texas Intruments TI99/4A computer as a teenager.

His introduction to SAP BusinessObjects began twenty years ago with Crystal Reports, for which he provided strategic training, report and custom application development to the healtchare and finance industries. Since that time, he has overseen the development and implementation of several custom add-on solutions for Crystal, Web Intelligence and the BusinessObjects platform.  He presently serves as SAP BI Solutions Architect for Connected BI Solutions, Inc. which he founded in 2014, providing expert consulting for the full gamut of SAP Business Analytics technologies, including the new SAP RESTful SDK.

Don is an active speaker in the BusinessObject community. He still has not found the limits of technology and innovation but is having fun trying.

Doug Evans, InfoSol Inc.

Doug Evans is Technical Manager of Migrations and COBOL Solutions Support for InfoSol. During the last three decades (he started in the industry when he was 12 – well, not quite), Doug has served in several capacities including a computer operator, systems analyst and programming manager. He has been involved in many large scale mainframe migrations which required the use of specialized ETL and ODS tools. Most recently, Doug has developed and delivered a SQL Server Integration Services training course.

Ethan Durda, Ascension Business Intelligence

Recent successful projects have included full implementations and upgrades of SAP Business Objects software and platforms including SAP Business Objects 4.1.  Ethan has specific technical experience involving data warehouse design, advanced data analytics, data quality and master data management, report development, and system analysis. While primarily focused on the technology in the SAP Business Objects platform, Ethan has experience in managing and delivering SAS solutions and other tools and environments.

Evan Davies, Safeway Inc.

Evan joined InfoSol after spending 10 years at SAP BusinessObjects, where he had multiple roles including pre-sales support and management, consultancy and training.  With over 25 years’ experience in IT, Evan has extensive experience in implementing large, mission-critical systems, coupled with many years in development, training and sales support over a wide range of hardware/software platforms.  Evan’s specialties include Crystal Reports and the BusinessObjects XI infrastructure.  Evan recently ended his career with InfoSol to join the team at Safeway Inc. to be their Crystal Admin.

Frank Zhang, Onshore Partners

Frank Zhang has a very strong background finance and IT. Frank functional experience in building both operational and financial planning systems in BPC as well as Business Objects dashboards. Frank is one of the few consultants that has successfully built BO dashboards within the BPC on HANA platform. He is a senior level consultant at Onshore Partners a boutique consulting practice that specializes in BPC. Frank is fluent in Chinese and with honors from NYU.

Fred Walther, APOS Systems Inc.

Fred Walther, Solution Consulting Manager at APOS Systems Inc., has 20-plus years experience in BI, and has worked on the implementation, optimization and migration of hundreds of BI deployments. Fred’s voice will be familiar to many who have attended APOS Well Managed BI webinars over the years.

Greg Berns, InfoSol Inc.

Greg Berns has worked on the InfoBurst product team since 2008, starting out supporting InfoBurst 2.6. When InfoBurst Enterprise was first released, he headed up the support and testing of the new product. This lead to being the support expert in charge of the ‘really hard to figure out issues’. Over the years, Greg has moved into a development role, responsible for developing the DriveBetter dashboard, BI4 support, and the revamped Support System. In his spare time, Greg enjoys hiking, camping, and learning about new web technologies.

Geoff Scott America’s SAP Users Group

Geoff Scott is the Chief Executive Officer for the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group, the world’s largest community of SAP professionals. He has more than two decades of experience as a chief information officer and senior IT leader.
Prior to his selection as CEO of ASUG, Geoff served as the Chief Information Officer for TOMS Shoes. In this role, he held responsibility for global technology strategy, execution and operations. This included leading the implementation of SAP for TOMS in September of 2012, with a team of more than 100 people.

Jake Tully, InfoSol Inc.

Jake Tully started working for InfoSol as an intern in January of 2013, and has worked his way up to being a Technical Consultant after graduating from ASU with a CIS degree. He loves coding in HTML5, but loves CSS3 even more. Jake’s also been known to create a dashboard or two, and also helps demo a variety of products that InfoSol has to offer. Aside from being somewhat of a geek, Jake enjoys various outdoor activities such as wakeboarding, longboarding, snowboarding, hiking, riding motorcycles, and the list goes on.

Jean-Francois Cayron, Sagitta BI

Jean-François Cayron started his career in Belgium in 1981 as an IBM programmer and system engineer. He later moved on to become an expert in Business Objects in 1994. Ever since that day he has helped countless customers throughout the world with all aspects of their Business Intelligence deployments, covering architecture, training, technical assistance and overall strategy.

His expertise ranges from base system architecture to universe and report development, and includes custom solution development using the various Business Objects SDKs. After 14 years at InfoSol and a short foray into the corporate world, Jean-François founded his company, Sagitta BI, in 2015.

Jeremy Champe, InfoSol Inc.

Jeremy Champe started his career with InfoSol in 2012 and became immersed in the world of business intelligence and InfoBurst in particular. In the three years since, he has become the primary product support tech and trainer for InfoBurst on both the bursting and caching sides. He has rewritten many of the training documents for InfoBurst and has delivered over one hundred hours of training on the product. He looks forward to continuing his education in the field of business intelligence and improving the InfoSol training experience. Outside of work, he enjoys reading, playing video games, hanging with friends, and immersing himself in geek culture.

John Whight, Palo Alto Medical Foundation

John works as a Systems Developer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). He has over 30 years experience in the field of software development and data analytics. Prior to joining PAMF he spent 14 years designing, developing and implementing software applications across a variety of industries. He moved to PAMF in 1997 and took advantage of the many opportunities to apply technology to healthcare, whether writing HL7 data interfaces, developing specialized software programs or using data analytics to help physicians improve their practice. John has had a busy last 3 years creating and deploying Business Objects dashboards in support of PAMF initiatives. Early in his career John placed a high value on the end-user experience and this has always been a priority for him in his software development. This has been apparent in his dashboard work where his team won at IBIS in 2013 and 2014. PAMF is part of the Peninsula Coastal Region of Sutter Health with over 1,000 physicians. It is one of California’s top rated medical groups.

John Wilcox, InfoSol Inc.

John Wilcox started his career in Information Technology in the UK in the mid-1980s and quickly developed a passion for creating innovative new software solutions, the first of which provided a way to integrate Honeywell Bull and IBM Mainframe applications with PC/Web Apps.John joined InfoSol in 2001 and was introduced to Business Intelligence tools for the first time and began to think about ways to create new software that could be used to help customers make the most of their BI – and the first version of InfoBurst was created in 2003 to provide a flexible report bursting solution for Deski. Since this time, InfoBurst has grown into a mature report bursting & publishing tool used by many sites to control their Deski, Webi, Crystal, Microsoft and YellowFin report delivery needs.

Today as CTO, John leads the InfoBurst product team and continues to innovate in areas such as high performance dashboards, HTML5 Apps and Mobile.

Kim Marshall, The Waldinger Corporation

Lori Wagner, Dana Holding Corporation

Lori Wagner is the manager of business analytics and decision support at Dana Holding Corporation. Lori has over 30 years of IT experience with the last 15+ years focused on Business Intelligence. During her career she has lead teams recognized for creating innovative business intelligence solutions receiving the 2010 Most Innovative Use of BusinessObjects Xcelsius Award from SAP and Innovation/Value Awards 2013, 2010, and 2009 from IBIS Annual Conference. Prior to Dana, she work at Bosch (8yrs) and Ford Motor Company (12yrs) guiding and growing their business intelligence vision. She is a frequent presenter and panel member at SAP and Industry conferences.

Mark Richardson, Rose-Richardson Enterprises, Inc.

Mark Richardson is a BI-focused Chief Technology Officer with 17+ years of experience on the Crystal Reports 7.0 through Business Objects Enterprise (4.1) platforms for various clients in the US and Canada. Most of his product focus on high-volume Operational and Transactional reporting solutions for Public and Private Sector clients. Mark is the Communication Chair for the ASUG Ontario chapter, and is active in the Open Data community.

Matt Duligall, InfoSol Ltd.

Matt Duligall is a Business Intelligence Consultant for InfoSol Ltd in Europe.  He has over 16 years of experience as a developer in the world of e-learning and electronic performance support. Since joining InfoSol Ltd. in 2014, Matt’s focus has been on creating intuitive and engaging HTML5 dashboards as well as developing new components and tools for the industry.

Mel Sheppard, InfoSol Ltd.

Mel Sheppard is a Business Intelligence Consultant for InfoSol Ltd, providing support and development services to clients across Europe. With over 12 years experience in Business Intelligence and data integration, Mel has implemented and supported large scale Business Objects deployments within the financial sector. Passionate about the visual communication of information, Mel has been working with SAP Business Objects since 2006. During this period she has gained expertise in administering enterprise deployments and using Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius) to develop intuitive, informative and insightful dashboards.

Michael Ward, Creative Technology & Training Solutions

Michael Ward has over 35 years providing technical high level consulting and training throughout North America.  He has been heavily involved with business intelligence since 1990, and has worked with a number of different business intelligence products.  He has over 18  years of BusinessObjects™ experience providing both consulting and training services.   He is recognized as one of the top BusinessObjects™ instructors in the county by a number of national training companies located in North America.  He is also involved in the development of BusinessObjects™ training for his company and for many of his clients.   He also provides high level consulting services.

Mike Reeves, Comdata

Minith Patel, InfoSol Inc.

Minith Patel is a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant for InfoSol Inc. He is adroit in Business objects system administration and is well-versed in Version Manager and 360View. He has Project Management experience and has worked on global design, implementation and development projects for business objects and has over 5 years of experience in SAP industry. In his free time he is known to be a Japanophile.

Noe Garcia, United Surgical Partners International

Noe Garcia has been immersed in the world of Business Intelligence since 2005. With an expertise in SAP Business Objects and InfoBurst, Noe has developed and implemented many different types of BI solutions for the Health Care, Retail, and Pharmaceutical industry. From creating award-winning dashboards to helping build BI departments from the ground up, Noe’s passion for BI continues to help companies thrive and succeed, one solution at a time.

Oliver Prucha, InfoSol Inc.

Oliver is a Business Intelligence Consultant for InfoSol who began his foray into Business Intelligence when he joined the company in 2012 shortly after graduating with a Computer Information Systems degree from Arizona State University. He is a SAP Certified Application Associate for both Web Intelligence and SAP Dashboards/Xcelsius, teaching courses and providing services for both tools. Striving to become a well-rounded Business Intelligence professional, Oliver continues to expand his BI skillset, having experience with also rendering services for Universe design, Crystal reporting, and IB Apps HTML5 Dashboards.

Paul Grill, InfoSol Inc.

Paul Grill started his career in Information Technology in the U.K. in 1978, as an Executive Data Processing Trainee for Honeywell. More than thirty years later, he still has a voracious appetite for learning as Information Technology continues to advance at an ever accelerating pace. He was first introduced to the world of Business Intelligence in 1991, in France, when he saw a demonstration of an early version of BusinessObjects on Windows 2.1. He returned to the U.S. to rave about this phenomenal product, but it was many years before BusinessObjects made it into the mainstream. Paul founded InfoSol in 1997, and made Business Intelligence one of the key solutions offered by the company. Today, InfoSol is a leading SAP BusinessObjects solutions partner, known for its expert consulting, education and innovative add-on solutions. Paul is well known within the SAP BusinessObjects community for his extensive knowledge of Business Intelligence, and he has lectured and written many articles on the subject. Paul enjoys writing, running and coaching kids soccer, and is passionate about Ancient Egyptology.

Paul White, Onshore Partners

Paul is a principal at Onshore Partners. Paul comes from a very strong functional base in accounting and finance including complex consolidations; driver based planning and full lifecycle S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning). After several years as a functional lead, Paul focused on purely technical roles that included complex SQL and procedural programming as well as complex ETL. In addition to running the day to day operations at Onshore, he still leads BPC design sessions.

Peter Warren, APOS Systems Inc.

Peter Warren, account manager at APOS Systems, has 15-plus years experience in data management and BI. In that time, he has worked with a diverse range of organizations, assisting them to develop progressive BI practices and achieve Well Managed BI environments.

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol Inc.

Rajesh Ponnurangam is a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant with Infosol. He is a SAP certified associate with extensive experience in design and development of Business Intelligence applications for apparel, retail, consumer goods and manufacturing industries. He specializes in Business Objects solutions, SAP HANA and BW data modeling. He has a proven track record in designing strategies for ETL, BI application development, implementation, rollout and support.

Rich Harvey, InfoSol Ltd.

Richard Harvey is a Business Intelligence Consultant for InfoSol Ltd in Europe. With more than a decade’ of experience in IT, he has worked in a variety of report and data management roles. Richard has been developing with SAP Dashboards (formally Xcelsius) since 2006 and, combined with his data management experience, has produced a number of innovative online and offline dashboards. Richard joined InfoSol Ltd from a leading UK financial services organisation where he had been heading up their Business Intelligence project team.

Rochelle Henry, Rural/Metro Corporation.

Rochelle Henry is a Business Intelligence Developer with expertise in SAP Web Intelligence, SAP Dashboards (Xcelsius), SAP Universe Design (UDT/IDT) and Infoburst. In her career she has implemented many new Business Intelligence reporting solutions leveraging multiple business units (including, but not limited to, Operations, Finance, Marketing, etc.) for the Pharmaceutical and Health Care industries. She has been recognized for creating valuable and best business metrics dashboards.

Roxanne Pittman, InfoSol Inc.

Roxanne is a Senior BI Consultant and has been with InfoSol for 9 years now. In addition to being a multi-certified instructor in reporting, universe and dashboard design, Roxanne has experience working with Fortune 500 companies as a consultant in the deployment of business intelligence solutions across the United States as well as in Europe, Australia and the Middle East. Roxanne’s passion for exciting data visualizations earned her the title of D-Va: Dashboard Visualization Artist, working with Xcelsius since 2006, Dashboards 4.x and most recently HTML5 dashboards using InfoBurst Apps. Roxanne shares Tech-Tips at http://infosolblog.com/

Ryan Goodman, Founder and CEO of Centigon Solutions

Ryan Goodman is Centigon Solutions CEO, author, global speaker, and expert in business intelligence. Ryan applies over 13 years of experience in designing business applications to his leadership role shaping Centigon Solutions strategy and innovation roadmap. Ryan currently leads a hand-picked team of experts at Centigon Solutions to deliver ground breaking desktop and mobile location intelligence solutions to SAP BusinessObjects customers worldwide.

Sebastien Goiffon, CEO of GB & Smith

Sebastien has been working on SAP BusinessObjects security management and implementation for the last 20 years. He is the CEO and founder of GB & SMITH. GB & SMITH streamlines and enhances software security. GB & SMITH goal is to ease the use of any application administration by providing effective, user-friendly and innovative Management Solutions.

Steve Thatcher, InfoSol Inc.

Steve is a Technical Consultant for InfoSol. He is a Certified Web Intelligence Application Associate and, in addition to teaching the SAP Web Intelligence report design courses offered at InfoSol, provides Web Intelligence services to customers. In addition to Web Intelligence, Steve is also a Certified SAP Dashboards/Xcelsius Application Associate, and continuously stays abreast of the many offerings of the SAP business intelligence solutions suite. Steve’s business intelligence background is complemented by his over 13 years in Corporate Finance gaining experience in financial modeling, reporting, and information system development.

Sumit Sarkar, Progress Software

Sumit Sarkar has been working in the data connectivity field for 10 years. His interests include performance tuning of the data access layer for which he has developed a patent pending technology for its analysis; business intelligence and data warehousing for SaaS platforms; and data connectivity for aPaaS environments – with a focus on standards such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and ODATA.

He is an IBM Certified Consultant for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence and TDWI member.

Tammy Datri, Grane Healthcare

Tammy Datri has 30+ years working in the Information Technology fields in a wide array of capacities including Custom Application Development, Administration of Turn Key Systems, Project Management and IT Department Manager. Her experience has been primarily in the Manufacturing and Healthcare industries. She has 15+ years of BusinessObjects experience ranging from Administration to Universe Design and Report Writing. Tammy is currently the Applications Manager at Grane Healthcare and is responsible for the BusinessObjects EDGE and Data Services deployment as well as the ADP/Kronos timekeeping and payroll systems. She has served on various councils and influence committees with Business Objects (prior to SAP acquisition), ASUG and SAP. She was a member of the recent ASUG BusinessObjects Customer Advisory Board. Tammy is currently the Program Chair for the new ASUG BusinessObjects SIG which has been formed to address the specific needs of the SAP BusinessObjects customer accessing Non SAP ERP backend data sources, SAP BusinessObjects Users Conference Program Committee, Developer Wars Committee and coordinator of the Pittsburgh BusinessObjects Users group since its inception in 2002.

Taylor Packwood, InfoSol Inc.

A graduate of Arizona State University with a degree in Computer Information Systems, Taylor Packwood began working at InfoSol in fall of 2012. Using a combination of his creativitiy and technical skills, he has developed a skill and passion in developing dashboards, choosing to specialize specifically in both SAP Dashboards as well as IB Apps HTML5 Dashboards.

Yolande Grill, InfoSol Inc.Yolande Grill is the COO at InfoSol Inc. “I like to think of myself as the Chief Transformation Officer. My favorite quote to ponder is one from Trina Paulus: ‘How Exactly does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so badly, that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar’. I love feeling inspired. I love how no matter what job we do, when we show up as who we truly are, we can make the choice to be the catalyst that brings about a positive change. Oh and I’ve worked in IT since the 80’s.”

Automating InfoBurst with iBShell

BI applications using Dashboards and InfoBurst XDC

Bursting Large Data Volumes Using InfoBurst Enterprise

Rich Harvey, InfoSol Ltd.

A detailed look at how the arval invoice schedule is structured to get the most out of InfoBurst and Business Objects to burst 10,000’s of reports out in a set time window.  This is covered in high level details in the case study, but this session is to give more technical details on how the schedule is achieved and the process of how I got there.

Topics to cover:

• The importance of understanding the BO limitations for parallel processing
• The importance of a highly tuned and efficient BO report
• How the parameters for the burst were batched up
• How the burst is created
• How the bursts are chained together
• Error trapping and automatic restarts
• Monitoring using Xcelsius

Bryan Baca, InfoSol Ltd.

BI report consumers are often inundated with files and attachments representing their various BI reports. Reduce that clutter with InfoBurst Content Grouping. Deliver a single file that contains a variety of reports, regardless of report type or source.

In this session you will learn about:

• Grouping report content to PDF and Excel
• Combining report content from various types of BI reports
• Grouping content by various criteria like email recipient and bursting variable
• Advanced grouping scenarios

Jeremy Champe, InfoSol Inc.

InfoBurst is a mission-critical application in many organizations. Its robust feature set makes it an integral component of many enterprise BI solutions. InfoBurst administrators must be prepared to optimize the InfoBurst system while responding quickly to user and environmental challenges.

In this session you will learn about:

• Deploying an InfoBurst server
• Backup and recovery techniques
• Platform and database migrations
• System redundancy
• Troubleshooting

Matt Duligall and Richard Harvey – InfoSol Ltd.

Launching at IBIS, this sessions will showcase the first product out of the InfoSol UK Labs, dCode.  You will get to see dCode in action, and learn how it enables you to take your Xcelsius dashboards onto Mobile devices (including smart phones), whilst maintaining the InfoBurst XDC data connectivity.

Noe Garcia, United Surgical Partners International

InfoBurst is more than just an application for report distribution. At USPI, InfoBurst is used in every aspect of Business Intelligence. From creating valuable and meaningful information packets for executives to using the tool as part of our data warehouse process, InfoBurst is at the center of it all.

During this session, you will learn how the BI team at USPI has solved a variety of business problems by leveraging InfoBurst (IB) to its fullest potential. One of the solutions we’ll discuss includes using IB to send out email alerts to facilities that are missing focus studies. Another solution will include how we used IB as part of the data warehouse team’s  ETL process for a data set that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Finally, we’ll also show you how IB can help keep BO licensing costs down by delivering reports and dashboards (Connected and Offline) to user portals instead of BO.

Eric Grill, InfoSol Ltd.

An InfoBurst user once described InfoBurst as a “BI Swiss Army Knife”. Sure, you know where the big knife and corkscrew are. But are you familiar with some of the lesser known, yet equally powerful, tools InfoBurst has to offer? In this session you will learn about various niche features that will enhance the value of your InfoBurst implementation.

• Deploying an InfoBurst server
• Backup and recovery techniques
• Platform and database migrations
• System redundancy
• Troubleshooting

InfoBurst Team, InfoSol Inc.

In this session the lead developers and members from the support team will talk about the roadmap for planned new features and invite feedback and ideas from current InfoBurst users.

Allan Williams, Manitoba Public Insurance

A look at the core BusinessObjects functionality for report bursting, scheduling and distribution versus the advanced functionality and flexibility available in InfoBurst. A brief overview of how InfoBurst functionality is being used at MPI will be presented in this session.

John Wilcox, InfoSol Inc.

InfoBurst Apps are HTML5 applications that have either been created by the AnuBis Designer (no coding) or have been developed from scratch to solve a more challenging business problem and in many cases these Apps are consumed from a mobile device such as an iPad.

One of the most powerful features offered by the InfoBurst Platform is “Cache Query” whereby a potentially large data cache is created on a regular basis using data from Webi, Excel or any Database and then consumed within the App to provide a fast data selection / drill-down.

Up until now these Apps must be connected to the InfoBurst Server and therefore could not function without a connection but the new version of the InfoBurst Apps for iOS client now supports the ability to take an App fully off-line where both the App and the data cache are downloaded to the iOS device and can function without a connection to the Server.

This session will start with an introduction to Apps and show examples of using the AnuBis Designer to create a simple App that consumes data from a cache and then how this App can be consumed off-line using the iOS client for InfoBurst Apps.

Rich Harvey, InfoSol Ltd.

A 1 hour session to provide a quick introduction to the following topics:

• What is an XDC?
• What options there are to consume XDC (Xcelsius, IBapps, AnuBIs etc)
• Cache vs Cache Query
• Seeing it in Action demo

Mike Reeves, Comdata

Comdata delivers reports to its customers (internal and external) via InfoBurst.  Those consist for 66,000 reports per month delivered on a daily, weekly, semi-monthly and monthly.  I will show you not only how this many reports get delivered but also how I set up and manage the amount of reports and keep them updated.  I will walk through how we deliver reports via email and also to FTP through use of distribution list.

Kim Marshall, The Waldinger Corporation

One aspect of our business provides equipment repair services for commercial customers, many of which have restaurants or facilities in multiple locations.  These repair services are provided for HVAC systems (heating, ventilation & air conditioning) as well as kitchen equipment (coolers, freezers, ovens, ice machines).

To visibly increase our level of customer service, we were challenged to provide a secure website where customers could view open calls by location and submit new requests for service on their equipment.  Amid feedback from Sales and Upper Management that a site like this would provide a distinct competitive edge, we were given a 3-month timeframe to deliver a basic Customer Portal.  Even though our team had little or no experience with web development, we did have strong database expertise.  We provided the database and stored procedures, and partnered with InfoSol to develop and deploy an HTML5 application utilizing InfoBurst XDC on the back end.  By using BI tools in a very practical manner, we successfully delivered a Customer Portal within the required timeframe.

Greg Berns and Jingxian Mao, InfoSol Inc.

AnuBIs provides business users the ability to create beautiful, powerful dashboards, that can be deployed to phones, tablets, and desktops. Last year AnuBIs was debuted at IBIS, come see all the new features that have been added, including designing a dashboard for multiple device types, off-line data access, and more.

Greg Berns, InfoSol Inc.

InfoBurst is a critical piece of infrastructure that runs 24/7 at sites around the world, delivering hundreds of thousands of documents a month. Come learn more about how this is achieved, and gain a deeper understanding of the IB Architecture. This talk is primarily aimed at IB Administrators, but power users will also benefit.

Rochelle Henry, Rural/Metro Corporation

During this session, you will learn how the BI team at Rural/Metro solved a Finance department need to report on the different organizational structure rollups for their monthly projections with a single WEBI report utilizing:

• multiple prompts
• database query
• delivery templates
• “Slice and Dice” report delivery to network share creating numerous distinct files

 

Zero to Hero in Six Months

How to Create a One Suite for All Enterprise BI

InfoBurst: The Interface That Delivers 66K Reports a Month for Comdata

Customer Portal – A Competitive Edge for Sales (HTML5 with XDC)

Improving Healthcare Patient Satisfaction Scores Using Business Objects Dashboards

No Longer a Wild Kingdom with Business Intelligence

Capitalizing on a Migration to Build Better Business Value – The Safeway Migration Experience

Top 3 Cases for Location Intelligence and BI

Look How Far We’ve Come– BI Case Study from BIOTRONIK

Derek Duff, BIOTRONIK

A case study of an organization the makes cardiovascular medical devices which adopted BusinessObjects business intelligence & reporting tools 3 years ago and the leaps the organization has taken based as a result of the decision. A historical as-is/to-be roadmap will be presented to describe the significant progress made within this time.

Additionally a current as-is/to-be roadmap will be presented to show where we expect to shift and explore within the next 2 years.

Dana’s Executive Balanced Scorecard

Analyzing the Analysis for OLAP

Developing a Cadence – Managing Requirements and Deliverables in a BI Team Using Agile Techniques

Get Set, Go BI Mobile

High 5 for HTML5 with BusinessObjects

KPIs – Getting Beyond the Noise

My FitBit is Broken, and Other Tales of Ineffective BI

Open Data and Open Government in the SAP BI Ecosystem Improving Transparency and Accountability

Practical BI Project Management Techniques

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 with SAP: The Chemistry Works

Strategic BI

The New Age of BI

Privacy and Ethics in Business Intelligence

No Longer a Wild Kingdom with Business Intelligence

How to Get Business Users Thinking Spatially With Maps and Webi

Look How Far We’ve Come– BI Case Study from BIOTRONIK

Derek Duff, BIOTRONIK

A case study of an organization the makes cardiovascular medical devices which adopted BusinessObjects business intelligence & reporting tools 3 years ago and the leaps the organization has taken based as a result of the decision. A historical as-is/to-be roadmap will be presented to describe the significant progress made within this time.

Additionally a current as-is/to-be roadmap will be presented to show where we expect to shift and explore within the next 2 years.

Dashboards and Design Studio:  The Car You Own and the Car You Dream of Owning

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol Inc.

SAP BusinessObjects dashboards (Xcelsius) has been one of the most popular dashboarding tools for over a decade. SAP Design Studio has created a lot of buzz among customers with its advent. Does SAP Design Studio compete with Xcelsius? Who are the target customers for Design Studio? Which tool should I choose for dashboarding in future? What would happen to all the dashboards created using Xcelsius?

This session will address all of the above questions in detail. The attendees will gain an understanding of Design studio’s features and capabilities and how it is different from Xcelsius. The pros and cons of using Xcelsius over Design Studio and vice versa will be analyzed. Step by step guide to recreate an Xcelsius dashboard using design studio will be demonstrated.

Designing Dazzling Dashboards Using Native Xcelsius Components

Roxanne Pittman, InfoSol Inc.

With an immense array of visually stimulating infographics and 3^rd party components available for Dashboards today, Xcelsius still provides users with a variety of customizable components to transform ordinary into extraordinary! The only requirement: an imagination and a few extra moments of time. This session will take an in-depth look at how to design dazzling and unique components using only BusinessObjects Xcelsius Dashboards.

Flat vs Skeuomorphic Dashboard Design

Mel Sheppard, InfoSol Ltd.

You may or may not be aware, but you are slowly being weaned off skeuomorphism right now (and a large number of us didn’t even know we were hooked).  Last year we saw a shift in the design world which led to cleaner, ‘flatter’ user interfaces and, as this trend pervades, it will start to become the norm for dashboards too.

In this session we will discuss what skeuomorphism is.  We will look at the advantages and disadvantages of the two design styles and identify the components and themes that best lend themselves to a ‘flatter’ dashboard design.  Takeaways from this session include:

• Understanding the difference between Skeuomorphic and Flat design
• Pro’s and Con’s of Flat design
• Tips and Tricks for a flatter UI

Hit the Spot with Third Party Components

Taylor Packwood, InfoSol Inc.

In an exciting world of endless Business Intelligence components, how to select the right component for your Dashboard is a question some of us may ask ourselves! This session will take a look at a variety of third party providers and components to utilize within BusinessObjects Dashboards. Taylor Packwood, expert Dashboard and HTML5 Developer, will demonstrate the use case and application of third party components that will guide you in the discovery process for the components that tend to hit the spot!

Query Browser vs BI Web Services vs XDC

Rich Harvey, InfoSol Ltd.

A look at Query Browser, BI Web services and XDC connectivity options for your dashboards.  This session is ideal for anyone wishing to know more about any of these options and how they compare.  No need to have experience building connected dashboards as we will show you how it’s done.

We will also examine the factors that may help you to choose one over the other.  This session includes quick demo of each of the options and a discussion around the benefits and limitations of each.

SAP Lumira – What’s In It?

Rajesh Ponnurangam, InfoSol Inc.

Learn about how SAP Lumira is simple and fun to use. This session will provide an in-depth look at different analysis scenarios and deployment options for SAP Lumira. Topics including multiple data sources, massaging the data, building a Lumira story and sharing the data  will be discussed. You will see a live demo of the points covered, and hear about the different features with SAP Lumira. An introduction to BusinessObjects explorer and its integration with Lumira will be discussed.  The audience can understand how SAP Lumira integrates into existing BI4 landscape.

Dashboards Requirements Gathering

Roxanne Pittman, InfoSol Inc.

A successful dashboard should start with good requirements.  This session discusses the questions that should be asked in order to drive effective requirements.  We will discuss questions to ask the Business, the Data Expert as well as standard KPI questions that will help launch a successful dashboard.   We will show examples of requirements as well as lessons learned from a multitude of dashboard projects.

Prototyping – Mock Up in a Day

Roxanne Pittman, InfoSol Inc.

Having a working prototype ready in one day can be a huge advantage for getting a Dashboard project off and running. This session will discuss the advantages this approach can have for a quick ROI, as well as the specific strategies for achieving this successfully.

Dashboards and Iterative Design Techniques

Roxanne Pittman, InfoSol Inc.

Dashboards tend to be “works in progress” that go through several iterations before the final version is released. This session will discuss strategies for having successful reviews to further the project and not get caught in the “scope creep” trap. This session will include lessons learned from the field, so you can avoid the pitfalls and have a successful dashboard project.

“Mobilizing” Your Existing Xcelsius Dashboards in 3 Easy Steps!

The 7 Deadly Sins of Dashboard Design and How to Avoid Them

Exploring HTML5 Custom Dashboards And Getting Started With IB Apps

Information Design for Dashboards

Hints and Tips for Cool Dashboard Visualizations and Components

Adding Help, Notifications and Tutorials in BI Applications

InfoBurst and Mobile Dashboards with dCode

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?

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.

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?