Quite some time ago, I wrote a blog about using Crystal Reports Alerts to get automated notifications in the event something significant happened in your data. I was recently working on a similar challenge, but when that encompassed not only bursting to specific users in this manner, but also giving them their own alert and target via email AND formatted for their mobile devices, I had to cook up something different. Crystal Reports + Publications + Profiles + Bursting + Alerts = a handy solution with only a little set up overhead. Fun! But not for the faint of heart.
Author: EV Technologies
But What About COBOL?
Don’t run away, you are in the right place There is something about business intelligence in here. Attending this week’s ASUG and SAP Sapphire events was a tremendous experience for me. Great discussions and learning opportunities on mobility, in memory computing, and SAP BusinessObjects Event Insight. Despite all that, one of the more interesting conversations that happened to me was on the flight home.
Troubleshooting Long Running Reports
I caught a tweetstream the other day that Diversified Semantic Layer’s friend and past guest, Michael Welter, had a question on diagnosing and solving for long running queries in Web Intelligence (Webi)…at least I think it was Webi. I saw it fly by and really wanted to weigh in, but it got away from me. I did not necessarily see answers to Michael’s question in that time frame, so I wanted to take some things that occurred to me and that I use in my debugging process.
I may be overly sensitive to this topic, now that I think of it. My first employer had a very very large data warehouse (at the time, largest in the world every other month). While full of rich data, it was painfully slow and as a result BusinessObjects was the perceived as slow by the business. Let’s work on that. I’m going to keep this post within the confines of Webi. There may be similar settings and techniques that can apply to Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Explorer, etc. (even Deski…sorry Jamie).
Reposcan – Mr. Clean for SAP BusinessObjects
The magic of the Repository Diagnostic Tool.
Looking Ahead to BI 4 Part 1
I’ve had a number opportunities to see BI 4 from both the perspectives of a demonstration as well as hands on. The more I see it, the more excited I get for what lies ahead for us. So as I try and fight my way through a two-month case of writer’s block, I intend to start gearing us all up for what we need to start considering to strategize for those well-planned upgrades (you know you want to). The first thing I want to tackle being an “all-things-server” lover, is what the new semantic layer means to your environment.
Xcelsius with BI Services and BW Variables
Over the last few weeks I’ve been working full steam on a project to lay Xcelsius on top of BW (Accelerated no less). One of the cool capabilities of BW to significantly improve performance over standard parameters is to use variables. Variables pass straight through from the BW query and look like a prompt in Webi. The variable is a parameter that gets passed to the BW query before it actually runs vs. being applied to the result set. This can net a significant performance gain.
BI Widgets and Xcelsius for Interactive Desktops
I was on the outskirts of a project some time ago that was seeking to create an interactive desktop for account reps. It was very ambitious and there was definitely consideration as to how BusinessObjects could fit into that architecture at the time. While there were only labs prototypes, we started looking at custom developed solution to plug BusinessObjects into a desktop.
Fast forward almost five years now and BI Widgets is one of those tools you don’t see in use very often. BI Widgets is a very simple little desktop integration app for SAP BusinessObjects that lets you embed report parts into your desktop that can be refreshed off instances and more. I’d like to explore how we might use it in a mix of today’s tools.
Consuming XML in Xcelsius
Scheduled XML creation can significantly enhance the performance of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
Marketing (Un)Intelligence
I had a great first job out of college. I was introduced to Business Objects, Teradata, and using them as technologies against what was at the time, the world’s largest non-government data warehouse. I stayed in the same group for my seven year run with that company working in the Strategic Marketing organization. Our goal was to design reporting systems and associated applications which made our marketing strategy more effective. From a high level, while it was a beast (mainly because of the huge base of data and customers we were dealing with) it was an established revenue generator with lots of smart things built into it. As I flip through a day’s worth of mail and see countless direct mail pieces, I’m left wondering, who came up with this marketing (un)intelligence?
Use Multiple Connections in a Single Universe
I’m not sure why, but this is an old trick that I’ve used that has come up twice in recent weeks for different deployments I work on. Everybody should know by now that a universe can only point to a single connection for any single query without federation in place. However, a fairly simple override can allow differing users to utilize a different connection each when they run a query.
Let’s take a scenario where you are using one SAP BusinessObjects instance. Within that reporting architecture, you have a base of users that have data on regional databases dbnorth, dbsouth, dbeast, and dbwest. When a user logs in and runs a report against the universe, they have to run against their assign database connection. You wouldn’t clone the universe four times….would you? (The answer is no)