As I mentioned earlier I watched a presentation on Publisher for XI 3.0. The main reason for doing that was to get access to the speaker, as he is also the project manager for the new Lifecycle Management product. This was a product / new feature mentioned yesterday in another talk and I was quite interested to see what they had to offer. So after the presentation was over and the after-presentation questions were addressed I was able to talk about the new product for about an hour or so.

Like I said, the people are much more accessible here.

I need to follow-up with an email and find out how much I can talk about here as far as features and so on before I post too much. I will be doing that shortly, and will post a resolution one way or another next week some time.

We also talked about migrations in general, and some of the issues that we’ve had at my current client. Having access to the product managers at the conferences is just awesome, and one of the best benefits to me as a consulting partner. It’s worth the price of admission.

They video taped the conference presentations this year, and the video is supposed to be posted soon. I believe I was told that you would have to register in order to be able to view the video but will confirm that before I post a link. The speaker ratings were not up yet (last year they were up the day after I spoke) and I suspect it’s because they’re still processing the video. It should be interesting… I would like to see what I look like when I am giving a presentation.

After the conference I spent some time touring Berlin with a new friend from San Antonio, then enjoyed a nice dinner followed by… wait for it… more ice cream. There is a Häagen-Dazs® ice cream parlor in one of the major restaurant areas in Berlin, and it just seems appropriate to eat there while visiting. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a very big fan of desserts.

So this wraps up my coverage of the conference from Berlin. Once again I had a great time, got some great information, and hopefully delivered a great presentation to share with the attendees.

I am watching a presentation on Publisher from XI 3.0 right now, and it looks impressive. (Seriously, I am typing this during the presentation. That’s probably rude, but I am doing it anyway, taking advantage of the power connection on the table because of my laptop battery.)

They’ve added a lot of performance features including parallel bursting. In one case study they sent out a million+ publications with a single job, using parallel processing on a 16 cpu box. It was a big box, of course, but being able to send out that sort of volume is impressive. The gentleman giving the presentation is also responsible for the new product Lifecycle Manager, so I hope to talk to him after the presentation is done.

Back to Publisher… I’ve worked with it some, and I do remember being quite frustrated about the lack of performance. We resorted to VBA code for one client to get a “run-once” functionality, and that’s in the product now. We used a 3rd party PDF merge process in order to take multiple PDF files and create a single statement; that, too, is built into the product now. Our process was designed to be restartable on error… that too, is built into the product. Are you starting to see a theme here? Basically the presenter started out admitting that there were issues with prior releases, but he states that with Publisher XI 3.0, and I quote:

We finally got it right

It looks like that may be the case from the feature list and the demo. I hope to be able to play with it soon.

While I have time, some general thoughts and ramblings about the conference experience…

My laptop battery has apprently become an issue. I have not been using it on the battery much lately, and apparently over the years its life has declined. I am now lucky to get more than 15 minutes of active time. Fortunately the rooms where they are holding the talks have power plugs available. I am currently sitting in Room A using the power to check email and write this post. The talk will start in about an hour or so.

The 2007 European conference was also in Berlin but in a different area of the city. Last night we visited that area and enjoyed a braut and beer (ginger ale for me) in a restaurant on the river by the conference hotel from last year. The food was excellent and the company (you know who you are…) was even more so.

I did not bring my digital camera with me on this trip. Last year I hauled it over here and took very few pictures, so this year I decided not to bring it along. We picked up some disposable cameras this morning to take a few shots, so perhaps I’ll get them uploaded at some point.

Overall I have enjoyed this conference. Even though it’s quite large (I am told there are about 9,000 people attending) the Business Objects part is two floors in one corner of the facility. Floor 4.2 is the open area with theaters and exhibitor booths and food and so on, and floor 4.1 is where the speaker areas are, along with the Business Objects test drives and more food. Did I mention they have food? I have not ventured into other areas where the focus is clearly on SAP.

It has also been interesting to hear more from some of the SAP folks. I talked to one person who was remarking that the SAP folks seem starved for anything related to BI. The simplest sort of report built in Web Intelligence draws “oohs” and “ahhs” from people that have never had access to these tools before. I imagine they’re quite happy to have these things available now.

Talk is about to start… see you again this afternoon.

CMC Improvements

Tim showed some screen shots in his presentation with new (and much improved) CMC functionality. Part if it is architecture, but a good bit is just user interface improvements. It’s tough to make a web application work like a client application, but they’ve made some adjustments. For example you can multi-select with the shift or ctrl key now, and there is a context sensitive menu available on a right-mouse click.

They’ve also done away with “advanced” permissions and replaced it with custom access levels.

Finally, there is an embedded “query tool” that lets you traverse relationships from one CMC object (a user) to another (a report, universe, and so on) and get the report on the screen. Someone in the audience asked if that report could be exported, and the answer at the moment is that it cannot. Someone else asked if that could be addressed via the SDK, and the answer to that was “yes, because everything in CMC is written with the SDK” so that sounds promising.

Audit Improvements

This was a very interesting point for the talk that was a bit short on details. It’s one of the last improvements that is going to show up in Deski, and it’s related to auditing. Both of the offline clients (the Webi Rich Client as well as Deski) will capture audit information and cache it locally. On a periodic basis they will send that information up to the CMS where the data is processed and then stored. It wasn’t until after the talk was over that I considered asking a question about what level of detail was being collected… so I have no idea. Something to learn.

Federated Repositories

Tim also talked about something called Federated Repositories. The concept here is that you can create a relationship between two repositories and schedule replication from one to the other. There are a few exceptions but for the most part anything (universes, reports, permissions) can be replicated. I used to work for a client that had a main office in one city and branch offices in other cities across the US. This feature would allow them to maintain only the home office repository as far as upgrades to universes and reports and those updates would be sent out to the branch offices on their requested schedule. Sounds very cool.

Other XI 3.0 Questions

Tim also suggested that the rich client was going to be a huge benefit to report developers. He then went through a couple of scenarios which I have personal experience with. For example, there is no “time out” setting on an offline client. With XIR2 it is possible to be working on a report and get called away for a meeting, a phone call, an urgent lunch… and by the time you return you have lost your work if you did not save. The offline client does away with that.

Someone asked “how much would it cost to migrate” and Tim corrected them. It’s not a “migration” to XI 3.0, it’s an upgrade. Then he proceeded to say that from a financial point of view he had no idea what the cost was. To be honest, I assumed that this should be an upgrade covered under maintenance. It never even occurred to me that there might be an additional cost for XI 3.0. (Note to self: find out what our partner rep says about this so our clients are not surprised.)

So that’s what I have to share for today. As it was yesterday, the weather is beautiful, the food is great, and there’s still more people wearing suits than I expected. I did not bring my camera with me, so I won’t have pictures. I had a nice lunch with Werner (wdaen on BOB)… we got to talk about Nikon technology for a bit. Oh, and there were a few other BOB members that introduced themselves after my presentation was over. I always appreciate that, even if (with over 30,000 members now) I cannot possibly remember everyone. I love hearing that people are using and benefiting from BOB.

I just got out of a presentation on the product roadmap by Frank Prabel. I always enjoy hearing him speak, and the content he has to share is always interesting because of his position in the company. Frank is the Senior Director of Product Management, so you would expect him to know what’s going on. His talk focused primarily on what is coming out in 2008, including XI 3.1 which supports the .NET framework as well as other *nix platforms.

Frank reiterated that there is not a lot being invested in the desktop client. He said there were a few new features for Deski in 3.0 (better auditing and publishing, smalling install footprint) but that this would most likely be the last release with anything new in that area. In talking to some of the other senior product folks they also commented that they use the offline Webi aka the “rich client” to do all of their work now.

One of the other exciting parts of Frank’s talk was about something called Lifecycle Manager which I had not heard about before. I haven’t gone to look on the Business Objects site to see if there is anything there yet, but if my understanding is correct this will also (at least potentially) be a part of the 3.1 release later this year. This product sounds like it will eliminate the migration wizard and add a whole bunch of new features that can be used to manage code movements. I am going to try to find out more and see what I am allowed to post.

I attended a talk by Roxane Edjlali earlier today. She is the product manager for the Semantic Layer (aka the “universe”) and I wanted to hear what was in store in that area. Working on universes is probably my favorite part of the toolset so anytime I get to find out what’s going on in that area I always make the time to do so. Roxane reconfirmed that the universe is the technology of choice going forward, and backed that up by talking about improved OLAP universe support, stored procedure support, and a number of other enhancements. The universe is going to continue to be the center of a Business Objects BI implementation.

I like that.

So much for the technical report, what about the conference itself? The weather is great… last year Berlin was unseasonably warm, and not very comfortable. If I wanted to be warm I could have stayed home. It’s quite cool and very comfortable today.

I don’t know if it’s the SAP influence but there are a lot more people here wearing suits than I remembered from the conference last year (which was also in Berlin). There are some casual dressed folks, but they’re the minority. I am dressed casual but am wearing a tie so I guess that’s a compromise.

Oh, and the food… the food never stops. At prior conferences there were set times for eating. If you didn’t get your lunch on schedule, you didn’t eat. This year they’ve kept food out on the tables all day long. The food is quite good; I am learning a lot and eating a lot. What’s not to like?

So if you will excuse me, there is some ice cream with my name on it. More details tomorrow.

There was also plenty of new stuff (or so it seemed) for the SAP folks in the same presentation.

I also managed to track down one of the folks that has been responsible for the Insight conferences in the past and tried to confirm the information going around (or lack of information ) regarding the fall Insight conference. At this point he could not formally confirm anything, so I guess we’re still in the dark at least for a while. I know that there have been some announcements regarding a fall conference in Dallas, and we did talk about that. Essentially I got the “can neither confirm nor deny those allegations” sort of remarks.

The conference overall is huge, of course. But it’s relatively easy to find the Business Objects wing and hang out there. I’ll try to post more details about the track sessions and other information as I have time (and laptop battery) to do so.

I had booked a flight from DFW to La Guardia (New York). From there I had to take a shuttle bus to JFK (also in New York) which is where most of the international traffic departs. From JFK I was flying to Brussels, and finally a connection from Brussels to Berlin. Or at least that was the theory.

I got to the airport at about 7:45 AM on Saturday for my 9:15 AM departure. Everything went well on that leg; I watched a few DVD’s and read part of a book. (I don’t generally work on airplanes anymore since seats are closer together and laptop screens are bigger. Those two facts make up for a very dangerous combination.) I got my checked bag from LGA and easily got a shuttle bus across down to JFK. That’s when the fun started.

When I was rechecking my bag I was told that the outbound flight was delayed by 2.5 hours. As he was reconfirming my itenerary the delay changed from 2.5 hours to 4 hours. Fun. It was about this point that I remembered that I had no idea which hotel I was booked into; I was meeing another Integra consultant in Brussels and we had the last leg of our flights together. Or at least that’s what I thought. It turned out he took a later flight into JFK so we were on the same (delayed) flight.

Long story short, we got here, but many hours late. From the airport we got on the train (the Berlin train system is quite good) and made our way to the SAPPHIRE site and got registered. From there we went back to the train and made our way to the hotel. Once we got the room configuration straightened out everything was fine.

I’m posting this from the wireless access point in the hotel lobby. I didn’t remember to check if they were providing wireless at the conference. If they do, I will see if I can post semi-regular updates over the next few days.