One of the biggest challenges Business Intelligence architects face today is user adoption. As architects we have to ask ourselves what are we doing wrong. At times we have the BusinessObjects infrastructure and tools in place but no one seems to be using them. Unfortunately there are is no silver bullet for this issue, but there are things we can do that when added together can start to have an impact.
Author: EV Technologies
Business Objects on Linux Part 4
I’m thinking that this will be the last part in this series for a while. I may certainly revisit the topic of SAP Business Objects XI on Linux, but for now, I think we’ll put a bow on it. I don’t know why but this post kind of makes me smile. We are going to crack open a big can of Windows Active Directory (AD) goodness. Hopefully by now, you’ve been through Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series. I hope good things have come of it for you. The topic I have been inspired to cover today is handling Active Directory authentication on XI 3.1 via LDAP. Score.
Business Objects on Linux – MySQL Tweak
My new twitterverse pal Greg Myers (@gpmyers) was giving the first part of this series a go on Oracle Enterprise Linux yet still demanding support. I tell ya…users! Just kidding @gpmyers. Anyway, he came up with an interesting problem. First off, the XI 3.1 installer for Linux didn’t seem to like the reference to localhost on the screen where the MySQL parameter for hostname was supplied. I think we decided that this was because of his hosts file. But that isn’t the point of this post. He actually installed MySQL stand alone to see if he could work around this issue and it didn’t work either. The great news is he was already well on his way to the solution when we caught up. Read on…
Business Objects on Linux Part 3
We’ve already made some awesome progress on our CentOS 5.4 environment running SAP Business Objects XI 3.1. First, we constructed an enviroment and laid down the base install, and immediately followed that up by learning how to control services via the command line as well as pointing our CMS to use a new Oracle database. This post is going to dabble briefly in architecture strategy, then jumping head first into the technical stuff again.
If you are reading this, you are probably on the admin/architecture side of your BI team. If you aren’t already thinking it, you should be hating the fact right now that in our little test, the web tier lives on the same server as BOBJ. Using the magic of VMware, we are totally going to fix that so we have a distributed architecture for our test.
Business Objects on Linux Part 2
In our last post, we stepped through getting Linux running on SAP Business Objects. However, I couldn’t leave you hanging with that. This will be part of what I hope to be a bit longer series to contrast things you might do with BO Enterprise on Linux compared to their Windows counterparts.
Let’s go over a few basics now that we have a cool Linux box up and going.
Business Objects on Linux – Step by Step
Note: Updated May 11, 2010 with a new step in the prerequisites section of this blog post.
I have come to the realization that I somehow got on a philosophical kick lately, as reflected in my last several blog posts. It’s time to get techno-nerd again.
A couple of recent questions on BOB inspired me to talk about Linux. And more importantly, installing SAP Business Objects on FREE versions of Linux. Before I ever had a chance to deploy SAP Business Objects on Redhat I really really wanted to try to do it on something that wasn’t going to cost me anything. Knowing CentOS for being effectively a free branch of the Redhat code base, I decided to start there for compatibility purposes. Let’s face it. Linux is an open source platform. The folks at CentOS picked up that code base, and did a giant find and replace on “Redhat” to “CentOS”. OK…maybe a tad bit underestimated, but we will start with that.
Universe Designer = Design Tool
I hate that title…but it is the best I could come up with…
At the risk of sounding a little bit redundant, my experience has taken me from the small enterprise with under 250 users to the giga-enterprise with upwards of 30k users. Regardless of size, each strives to implement processes to improve the development lifecycle within all of IT. Inevitably, these processes get trickled down to the business intelligence teams as well with the edict to implement them on both universe and report design. I’d like to challenge that this may not be the best approach for the enterprise.
Drinking the Web Intelligence Kool-Aid
Moving from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence
Optional Prompts with Default Values in Designer
Updated 4/12/2010 – I feel like a blockhead. I went to reference my own blog and found a copy and paste issue in my formula below. It’s fixed (I hope). Sorry!
Truth be told, today I felt like a total rookie. I got a requirement that screamed “don’t dare duplicate that report just so you can have a version to schedule and version to run on demand”. The requirement was to run a Web Intelligence report monthly through the job server (always running for the prior month when executed) but to also allow the user to open, refresh, and be prompted for a list of values. I spent a few minutes tinkering with some SQL that ultimately lead me to a simple pre-defined condition for my reports. I’m certain this has been blogged and forum posted to death by now, but I’m going to throw it out there for fun.
Using Crystal Reports For Automated Alerts
Have you ever been asked to automate the identification of errors in data? As an administrator, what if you could automatically identify reports in the SAP Business Objects CMS that exceeded 100 MB in size or users with more than 15 instances of any given report? What about from a reporting integrity perspective…it would be fantastic to identify reports with orphaned objects before a user encountered an error.
Using the inherent capabilities in SAP Business Objects Enterprise, organizations utilizing Crystal Reports can easily take advantage of Alerters to automate these types of questions. This capability, coupled with the rich metadata provided by the Sherlock suite of products, creates an awesome tool for admins to get proactive about monitoring the platform.