Demolition Derby, Part 1: Derby, maybe?

If you’ve been following the developments in the BI4 world over the last year, then you’ve undoubtedly noticed the long-awaited and much needed addition of the Monitoring engine. For years I used to jibe SAP about how BOBJ was really designed as a stand-alone, small use application. BI4 is the first major step towards a truly “enterprise” application. The monitoring engine is some good evidence of this. Where system administrators used to be blind to internal operations of BI platform, we now have unprecedented visibility.

Designing Business Intelligence: Users and Stakeholders

Watch this. No seriously, go watch that video and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here…

While recently watching that TED talk presented by Timothy Prestero, I was again reminded of something that I learned from Blair Wheadon while working as a product manager for Crystal Reports @ SAP: It is important to clearly define not only who is going to use your product, but also who is going to select it and who is going to pay for it. Timothy repeats this while talking about his quest for developing medical equipment for children in developing countries by using the sentence: “Who would use, choose, and pay the dues for your product.”

Auditing SAP Dashboards in BI4

If you have been following me in the community enough you know I’m a system statistics nerd. I love Auditor. I wrote Sherlock with my buddies because I love system statistics. And, with the release of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 (BI4), we have new stuff to audit!

Working with a customer rolling out SAP BusinessObjects for the first time, we (shockingly) were experiencing performance nightmares with SAP Dashboards. You don’t want dashboards that load in more than a handful of seconds. Many of you may scoff that this is impossible, but I’ll argue any day that a dashboard shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load. Yet, this is not the purpose of this post. Let’s talk about auditing dashboards.

Ghosts in the Database

It is a little early in the year for ghost stories, but this chilling tale can’t quite wait for the leaves to change and the apple cider to harden. Let me spin my haunting tale. Come with me if you dare.

It was a dark and stormy night. Storm clouds billowed in the distance in the light of the full moon, punctuated by the occasional flash of lightning, foreshadowing the torrential storm to come.The shiny new BI4 system hummed quietly along after the day’s successful upgrade of content from XI 3.1. Then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the DBA’s paged me, your humble on-call BOE Administrator, saying the database is going crazy with queries. The source of all of the queries is the BI4 system. But how can that be? The system is brand new. Nobody is logged in yet. There are no scheduled jobs yet.

The Power of the Information Design Tool

Imagine this scenario: you have customer delivery data in your SAP BW system and quality control data is contained in nine separate location specific Oracle databases. You need to pull the quality data associated with products that have been delivered to a customer over the last several months and will want to continue ongoing monitoring.

SAP Support – Outside In

Thanks for stopping by. EV Technologies, DSLayer, and SAP Support are partnering together to get your feedback on the state of Business Analytics/BOBJ documentation. You can either share your contact info or submit anonymously. Either way, don’t miss the opportunity to drop some feedback.

If you want to get the entire story, head on over to the Diversified Semantic Layer podcast for the audio chat about this survey.

Are you ready to just move along to the survey? Stop by and respond at surveymonkey.com.

Upgrading SAP BusinessObjects Mobile Apps

Recent tweets have brought up a fun fact: Your mobile devices are in as much need of testing as anything. Over the years, I think it is easy to be snowed by the ease and simplicity of deploying the app. Apps just work. Thanks to Steve, we have a platform (or platforms if you want to count Android) whereby developers can easily deploy source code and our apps magically appears as updates and work. But in the enterprise world, despite the fact that they are just apps, I’m here to tell you not to just blindly install SAP BusinessObjects apps like SAP BusinessObjects Mobile (SAP BI), SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Mobile (SBO Explorer), or SAP BusinessObjects Experience (Experience).

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