Sherlock® 2.4.0 – WebI for BI4, UNX, and Efficiency

With this release, we focus on Web Intelligence content from BI4, UNX, Performance, and Efficiency. For the past few weeks, the team at EVTechnologies has been working on several new features which we have just finished packaging into Sherlock® 2.4.0. The overall focus for these new features is to tell you more about your SAP […]

SAP Business Objects XI 3.1 SP3 is Here

It’s Christamas in May. SP3 is here. I’ve already nabbed the Enterprise install, client tools, and Live Office for starters. I’m particularly interested to see what the Xcelsius servers are going to do for me.

If you are looking for specifics, check out the SMP note 1456899 for all the associated guides. Enjoy.

Certification for Sherlock is soon to follow I’m sure.

Driving SAP Business Objects User Adoption

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.

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.

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.