I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of projects with a significant number of customers that have really really large systems. At the same time, I’ve been just as lucky to be a part of projects with small systems. There is a consistent theme in either, though. Someone has to cough up the cash […]
Tag: Business Intelligence
10 Steps to SAP BusinessObjects BI4 – Get The Business Buy-In
Get your business users to buy in to your upgrade strategy.
10 Steps to SAP BusinessObjects BI4 – Get All Key Players to Table
Begin your SAP BI4 upgrade project by getting ALL IT stakeholders to the table.
Semantically Speaking
My friend and fellow SAP Mentor, Ethan Jewett, and I, have had a series of good conversations. We kicked things off with my original post on the rift between BW-types and BOBJ-types. It caught attention and we had some great community discussion. In the spirit of our conversation, Ethan followed that up with his thoughts […]
The Rift between BW-types and BOBJ-types
There has been much discussion in the twitterverse, in blogs, on podcasts, and elsewhere I’m sure, about the place of SAP BW. Those discussions have really morphed over the last few months from the flurry of tweets over the perceived death of SAP BW at the hands of its little sister SAP HANA (now hopefully put to rest…or is it???), to the value for non-SAP ERP customers. In one of this year’s episodes of the Diversified Semantic Layer, one question we tried to tackle that and I’m just not sure we got to was: what is the value of SAP BW to SAP BusinessObjects customers? While we had a really great discussion, I think there is still more left there to uncover.
Demolition Derby, Part 3: Dear SAP Claus
Greg’s wish list for BI 4.1 monitoring improvements.
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.”
A Pound of Cure
Experience is the hardest teacher. And the cruelest.
I had a blog worthy experience the other night while patching a BI4 production system.
Back in the good old XIr2 days, we used to have to take a total outage to apply a server patch to BusinessObjects Enterprise. On that version, the patcher needed the services to be down in order to update them, then you would start them back up manually once you were finished. In a cluster it was the same.
What is the Remote Support Component?
If you’ve been an administrator of Business Objects Enterprise for a while like we have, then there are a few big questions you regularly get asked and until now have had no good answers for.
What’s going on inside of Business Objects when I run a report? Which step in the process is taking so long?
How do I know when something bad is lurking in there?