May 21 2008

SAPPHIRE Day 3 – It’s Over

Categories: 2008 SAPPHIRE (Europe),Conferences Dave Rathbun @ 6:12 pm

The final speech has been spoken, the final demo has been given, and the final beer has been consumed. (What do you expect, the conference is in Germany… 😛 ) The beer was consumed by someone other than me (I don’t drink beer) but I sure enjoyed the company anyway. One of the things that I have found both this year and last is that with the smaller conference people are much more available. Obviously the full SAPPHIRE conference is very large (up around 9,000 people I was told) but the Business Objects portion of it remains smaller than the American Insight conferences. That means I get to talk to many more people that are both interesting and interested in what I might have to offer. Today was a great day for that. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – It’s Over”


May 21 2008

SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 2

Categories: 2008 SAPPHIRE (Europe),Conferences Dave Rathbun @ 7:50 am

I had an opportunity to meet the head of ASUG at lunch today. It was a good lunch (I’ve already posted about the food 🙂 ) as we got a chance to discuss some of the initial feedback on BOB regarding how user groups are going to be managed under SAP. I posted a few notes about it here already. In a nutshell there are some potentially exciting things that will be coming in the next year or two for the regional user groups. But of course that’s not all that’s going on today. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 2”


May 21 2008

SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 1

Categories: 2008 SAPPHIRE (Europe),Conferences Dave Rathbun @ 4:05 am

Wednesday has dawned (bright and early, thanks to Alan Mayer who I am sharing a hotel room with 😛 ) and so I am able to post some thoughts before the day gets along too far. I watched only a portion of the general session this morning so I don’t really have any comments on it. The first track session that I plan to attend is on the text analysis tool that Business Objects purchased last year. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s essentially a tool that allows you to scan unstructured data like blog posts or forum topics 🙂 looking for information. One of the standard demonstrations shows how this tool can let you scan hundreds or thousands of emails that come into your customer service department and get an overall “feel” for the sentiment of those communications. It’s an interesting idea.

While I have time, some general thoughts and ramblings about the conference experience… Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 1”