SAP BusinessObjects Universe Development for Non ERP Data
Date: Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Time: 12:00 p.m. ET
Duration: 60 minutes

Join the ASUG Crystal Reports SIG for their upcoming Webcast, Accelerate Your SAP BusinessObjects Universe Development for Non-ERP Data.

In this Webinar you will understand what an SAP BusinessObjects Universe is, how to identify and resolve the most common structural issues facing a universe developer and how to quickly resolve them against non-ERP data.

Why the emphasis on “Non ERP Data”? When I build a universe on top of a cube (whether SAP or other source) I don’t have many issues to solve. Everything comes in based on the structure of the cube. With SAP using Crystal in more and more places, I wanted to make it clear that I was not going to be talking about cube sources but relational sources instead.

It will be a quick (one hour) overview universe design, including a couple of loop resolution techniques and I think I also talk about fan traps.

I got up about 5:30 am local time in Australia. I was in the airport by 7:30 am, and checked in for my flight by 8 am. They had extra security checks… I got flagged. That meant I was pulled out of the boarding line and was one of the very last people to get on the plane. Which I was able to do by 10 am. We took off, flew over the Pacific Ocean, and landed in California at 10 am. That meant that I landed in LA before I had taken off in Australia. I guess getting to do Friday over (twice) made up for the fact that I lost my Saturday on the way out.

In any case, I got home safely and with some interesting tips and exciting memories from the Mastering BusinessObjects conference in Melbourne. The spring conference season is over (at least for me) so now it’s time to start planning for…

… summer vacation.

What I liked about slide I got was that it was based more on use rather than function. In other words, it didn’t focus on the features of the products but instead asked what was going to be done with the products. The first decision point in the flowchart was simple: is the user request for delivery or discovery?

What does that mean, and what products ended up on either side?

Information Delivery

Some products are all about the delivery process. Take Crystal, for example. For over a decade it has been one of the premier tools available for taking information and delivering it to the masses. Someone once told me that my utility bill, phone bill, bank statement (does anybody still get those anymore? or are they all online?) were most likely prepared and sent via Crystal. There are some interactive options with Crystal, but I think most folks would agree that this product is solidly on the delivery side of the equation. Here’s the flowchart path for Crystal:

Objective: Information Delivery
Type of View: Operational Report
Presentation: Formatted
Result: Crystal Reports

I found it interesting that the SAP slide included Xcelsius on the delivery side. Xcelsius is often presented as an interactive “what if” tool, which might lead to the conclusion that it’s a discovery tool. It’s really not, at least not in my opinion. I laugh a little bit inside when I see some of the demonstrations of the tool. Really, how smart to you have to be to know that if you reduce costs your profit is going to go up? Unfortunately, reducing costs is never as simple as moving a little slider control to the left. Users cannot discover anything beyond what is delivered on the dashboard. Here’s the flowchart path for Xcelsius:

Objective: Information Delivery
Type of View: Business Analytics / KPIs
Result: Xcelsius

Web Intelligence also shows up on the delivery side of the chart. I’ve certainly worked on more than one project where this tool was used to create and then distribute enterprise reports. I think most folks would agree that Web Intelligence scores far higher than Crystal Reports on the interactivity scale. Web Intelligence does suffer when compared to Crystal as far as analytical functions, and certainly falls short of the “pixel perfect” formatting that Crystal offers. But over the years Web Intelligence has certainly become an excellent product. Here’s the flowchart for Web Intelligence:

Objective: Information Delivery
Type of View: Operational Report
Presentation: Interactive
Result: Web Intelligence.

For those of you on the Desktop Intelligence “death watch” now is probably a good time to mention that it doesn’t show up anywhere on this chart. It doesn’t show up on any of the road maps for XI 4.0 either… make of that what you will.

Information Discovery

Now I move to the other side of the process: discovery. What tools are presented here?

I’ve been posting a bit about exploring Explorer via the OnDemand site. I would have to say that Explorer is the epitome of discovery; that’s exactly what it was built for. Explorer allows me to set up a data set that includes as much information as I can stand (which can be quite a lot, with the accelerated version) and poke my way through it. Here’s the flowchart path for Explorer:

Objective: Information Discovery
Type of Discovery: Unbound
Result: Explorer

But what if I don’t want to (or can’t afford to) let my business users access everything that I have? There are more tools that allow me to “discover” my data without being completely unbound. For example, BEx Analyzer / Voyager. These are true OLAP tools. (I say “true” because Web Intelligence has been presented as “desktop OLAP” in the past, and BusinessObjects will talk about their report cubes, but it’s not really true OLAP in my opinion.) BEx Analyzer is a legacy SAP product, and Voyager is from BusinessObjects. SAP has frequently talked about taking the best of both products and releasing a new OLAP tool named Pioneer with XI 4.0. How do I get here on the flowchart?

Objective: Information Discovery
Type of Discovery: Defined scope of analysis
Type of Analysis: Advanced
Source: SAP BW Result BEx Analyzer
Source: Non BW Result Voyager
Future: Pioneer

These products suffer some when compared to other tools because they can only take me as far as the cube goes. If I need more data, I either need to rebuild (extend) by cube, or get data somewhere else. SAP is making excellent strides in the “get data somewhere else” category with XI 4. Of course I have not seen anything yet, so plans (feature sets, release dates, and so on) are still subject to change. But the intent is to allow me to start out in Pioneer and seamlessly transition to Web Intelligence once I get to the boundaries of my cube. And speaking of Web Intelligence…

Web Intelligence also appears on the Discovery side of the chart. Here’s the flowchart path:

Objective: Information Discovery
Type of Discovery: Defined scope of analysis
Type of Analysis: Casual
Result: Web Intelligence

How about that? Web Intelligence is being presented as both a Delivery and a Discovery tool, and I will say that I do agree with that. It can be used as a delivery path (along with Crystal and Xcelsius) but can also be used as a discovery option, given the interactive drilling features and easy adhoc abilities of the tool.

Conclusion

SAP inherited a lot of different tools when they acquired BusinessObjects. They have made tremendous progress in the past two years in consolidating and targeting those tools to specific uses. The flowchart attached to this post does a nice job of summarizing those purposes. With XI 4 coming very soon, we should start to see easier and better integration between products (being able to jump from Explorer to Web Intelligence, for example). I’m started to get more excited to see what we’re going to get and how it all pulls together.

Related Links

• Pick the Right SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Tool, present for ASUG by Ingo Hilgefort
• SAP BI Decision Tree (Flowchart) as a PowerPoint slide (794K zipped)

That membership will include full access to the online community at asug.com, the ability to attend all regional chapter meetings throughout the U.S. and Canada, and access to education and Influence activities specific to the non-ERP BusinessObjects customer. These are the primary services available via paid memberships, and the test drive through the end of 2011 should help prove what the true value is. I am guessing the reason they went to the end of 2011 was to show a full cycle of Influence Council meetings. The free membership is only for legacy BusinessObjects customers; it will not be offered to SAP ERP customers. That makes sense.

What happens for existing BusinessObjects customers that have already joined and paid for their membership? Bridgette covered that too. Those members will be recognized as “founding members” and will receive special benefits, including credit towards the upcoming BusinessObjects User Conference. There will be more details later, but I am very encouraged by this development. This is what we (the former GBN steering committee) and others were asking for. Obviously ASUG listened.

The tracks this year include:

• Business Intelligence Strategy
• BusinessObjects Data Management
• Crystal Reports
• Dashboarding
• Enterprise Performance Management
• Explorer
• Governance, Risk & Compliance
• Infrastructure
• Universe
• Xcelsius
• WebI/DeskI

There are fewer tracks this year; last year there were two Xcelsius tracks which resulted in a lot of Xcelsius content. I think some folks thought there was too much, as it was not really possible to see everything. Hopefully this year will be more focused.

I have had the opportunity (and good fortune) to present at quite a few conferences over the years. It’s a little known fact that my very first presentation back in the 90’s was an unmitigated disaster. Despite that terrible beginning I have been allowed to inflict my horrible sense of humor and hopefully some bits of knowledge on conference attendees for over a decade. Because of the recent successes (certainly not for my first effort) I am often asked a couple of questions.

How do I get selected?
What if I don’t have anything to say, why should I consider presenting?
Any tips for a successful presentation?

In this post I would like to share a couple of tips for getting your abstract selected without resorting to slipping a $20 bill to everyone on the selection committee.

Give The Selection Committee Some Options

The first and best suggestion that I can make is to submit more than one abstract. There is an old saying that goes something like this:

Don’t keep all of your eggs in one basket

In this context it means don’t pin all of your hopes on getting selected on a single abstract. I’ve listed the tracks for the conference this year above… which ones do you think will be “hot” this year? Those that are will be the ones that are the most likely to be over-submitted. The selection committee will have a hard time getting down to the required number of selections (and alternates). If you don’t make the cut with your one abstract, you’re out of the process.

Suppose you really want to deliver a topic on Xcelsius. Last year we had two tracks dedicated to this product and this year there is only one. I believe that means this year the Xcelsius track has the best chance of being over-submitted. What do you do? Twist things around a bit. How about submitting a topic titled “Universe Design Best Practices for Xcelsius Consumption” or “Using Xcelsius Components in Crystal Reports”? Either of those could be submitted to a different track and therefore may be much more likely to get accepted.

Update Something From Last Year

This is a technique we used with great success when I was a consultant for Integra Solutions. My best example of this technique from my own personal experience: my series of “Variables” presentations. My first presentation (named “Variables and More Variables”) got things started in 1997. It was designed to provide tips and techniques to help folks make the transition from version 3.1 (not XI 3.1, just plain 3.1) to 4.0. When the time came to submit abstracts for the following year I submitted “Variables and More Variables… the Sequel” as an option. I was laughing as I did it, thinking that if this worked I knew what I would be submitting for the year after as well. It did get accepted. And the year after that I submitted (and delivered) “Variables and More, Third Edition” to an appreciative audience. In my opinion the best part of this story came years later when I did not submit a variables talk. I actually got a call from the selection committee asking why I had not submitted the next chapter in that series.

Remember… Not Everyone Is An Expert

Your idea for an abstract does not have to be super-advanced to get selected. Some folks may be attending the conference for the very first time. They may have only installed the product a few months prior to attending. They’re not ready for the deep-dive super-advanced topics; they just want to gain some understanding on how things work. We used this concept at Integra as well when we started our “Essentials” series of topics. These were designed to cover the (as the name would suggest) essential basics of a product so that folks can become productive faster by knowing where to concentrate their efforts. Over the years we delivered the essentials of Web Intelligence, Universe Designer, Xcelsius, and some other tools that escape me at the moment. Since I have already dusted off one old saying, how about another:

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king

You don’t have to know everything to have something to share. You just have to know a little bit more than someone else. I rarely will tag my presentation topics as “Advanced”; I will instead create beginner or intermediate topics because I think a broader audience will benefit. The advanced stuff comes when people come up after the talk to ask questions.

Keep It Focused But Not Too Specific

This is my last tip for this post, and it may be a bit controversial. I suggest that you don’t get too specific in your abstract. If you do, you may end up painting yourself into a corner. (That’s the last saying for this post, promise.) Let me once again fall back on my “Variables” talk as an example. In my abstract I didn’t detail each and every technique that I was going to cover. In fact I had about a dozen different ideas down on paper before I submitted the abstract. Here is rough draft of the abstract submission for one of these presentations.

Unleashing the full power of the BusinessObjects reporting tool involves an understanding of what can be done with your data once you have access to it. The Slice and Dice panel can be used for basic analysis, but barely scratches the surface of what can be done for processing data. This presentation will provide solutions that can be put to immediate use, and includes topics like complex report variables, new ideas for functions, and some simple solutions to complex problems. Samples of each technique will be provided.

This abstract promises to deliver “simple solutions to complex problems” but doesn’t get specific about what those problems are. It mentions “complex report variables” but doesn’t give examples, at least not in the abstract. The goal is to write an abstract that promises to deliver without getting too specific about what, exactly, will be delivered. Make sense?

To be honest, there are plenty of folks that don’t like this strategy. They would rather provide technical and very specific details in their abstract. They believe that helps their abstract stand out during the selection process since the committee knows exactly what they are getting. I can see the value in that. My counterpoint would be that there is a six month gap between the abstract submission process and the actual conference. A lot can happen in six months. I would rather leave things more open in case I learned an especially cool new trick before the conference. For that reason, especially with the variables papers, I tried to keep things generic.

Good Luck, Now Let’s See Those Abstracts

These tips are based on my own experiences as a speaker. Because Business Objects (the company) ran the selection process for so many years I was never part of the actual selection process. Now that ASUG (a user-driven organization) is running the conference we all have the opportunity to volunteer and help out with making our fall event the best it can be.

Just don’t think you can volunteer to be on the selection committee just to make sure your own abstract gets selected. It doesn’t work that way.

Related Links

• Call for Papers for 2010 fall conference

The fear is that people are being lured into Facebook with the promise of a fun, free service, and don’t realize that they’re paying for it by giving up loads of personal information.

Why is Facebook in hot water now, when other Internet-based companies like Amazon have been collecting and using our personal data for years? Maybe it’s because Amazon doesn’t automatically add new apps to your profile if you browse other sites while logged into their service. (Facebook reportedly allows this, although some articles are now providing responses from Facebook that dispute exactly how this process is supposed to work.)

I’m not writing this post to bash Facebook (you can probably find plenty of that already). I’m writing this post because I wanted to share an interesting visualization that I found from an author named Matt McKeon. He shows how the privacy settings for Facebook have broadened over the years. He also admits that some of the data had to be “made up” because he does not have access to hard numbers from Facebook, so read the information with that in mind.

For example, in the early days it appears that your Gender information was displayed to all Facebook users but not to the Internet at large. Now it is. Your “Likes” and “Photos” were initially private; now they are also exposed to the entire Internet. Here is Matt’s take on what the initial privacy settings looked like in 2005:

scaled to fit my blog format, please click to see the full sized image

Here is the projection for the most recent privacy settings in 2010:

Scary? I think so. You can “opt-out” of some of these features, which is contrary to how I believe services like this should work. Everything that potentially exposes my personal data to someone else should be “opt-in” instead. As a slight digression: this is one of the main reasons I am not a member of any social network. I’m not a rabid privacy advocate. But I appreciate retaining control (or at least as much as is possible) over my own information. That’s why I host my own blogs and maintain my social networks the old fashioned way.

Either way, I found Matt’s design for the graphics to be quite intuitive and easy to read. He built them with an open source javascript package named processing.js. Download link below if you are interested.

What About Other Stuff?

Facebook is hardly alone in this privacy issue. Do you use Google maps? Then you might start seeing advertisements for nearby restaurants while you’re walking downtown. Foursquare is a relatively new service that is attracting a lot of attention, and it survives only because people are willing to give up their privacy.

Remember the scene in the movie “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise is shown targeted advertisements after a quick retina scan?

Related Links

• The High Price of Facebook at Newsweek
• Evolution of Privacy on Facebook blog post by Matt McKeon
• Homepage for processing.js the open source package used to build the visualizations shown above

Executive summary

SAP is going to be paying $65 / share for Sybase. They’ll pay some of it out of cash, and they are financing the rest. Kind of like buying a house.

Why are they buying?

SAP says they like Sybase because of their “mobile presence” and their in-memory database technology. Sybase IQ has offered in-memory column-oriented database architecture for years, and SAP makes use of the same concepts with their accelerated version of Explorer. So I can see where that part is coming from. I will admit that I am not completely up to speed on the mobile offerings from Sybase. In fact, I wasn’t even aware they had any. So I guess I have some research to do.

I have to imagine that one of the biggest “woots!” going on at SAP headquarters is coming from the folks that no longer have to sell Oracle database packages along with the SAP ERP. It’s probably hard to put a value on that.

The market has initially had a negative reaction to the news with SAP stock trading down in after-hours trading. Sybase is, of course, way up. Oracle is also down as this impacts them in a couple of ways.

I’m only skimming the surface of this, as I only found out a bit ago. My final thought: what does this do to or for Microsoft?

Notice the date? The coupon is supposed to expire on April 12, 2010.

I got the email on May 11, 2010.

See the problem?

After a brief phone call with Best Buy, it turns out the coupon date is actually Dec 12th. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what the actual report failure was. A clue: there is nothing wrong with the data.

I’m also pleased to say that earlier this week we integrated the ASUG event calendar with BOB. Twice a day the BOB server will poll the ASUG server and retrieve an updated listing of events and post them to the BOB calendar. So if you’re a visitor to BOB you can quickly and easily see what’s coming up with ASUG. The ASUG calendar is open for public viewing so you can get full details on the events that interest you. You will have to register (join) to be able to participate, but it does help being able to see the topics ahead of time and determine how valuable they are for you.

Here is the summary of the first session that I plan to attend:

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) – When to Use Which BI Tool?

Date: Wednesday, April 28
Time: 12:00 PM (ET)
Duration: 1 hour

On this Webcast, attendees will learn about the different SAP BusinessObjects BI tools and how to ensure they select the right tool for the right job. This Webcast will demonstrate how to ensure a successful BI project based on user requirements. The tools to be covered during this Webcast include: Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, BusinessObjects Explorer, and BusinessExplorer/Pioneer, with a focus on the current available release XI 3.1.

Speaker: Ingo Hilgefort, SAP

Ingo is a fellow SAP Mentor and has an amazing depth of knowledge across the SAP Business Objects product suite. I can’t imagine a better person to lead this webinar, and I am definitely planning to attend to hear what he has to say.

Fellow BOB member (and long-time listserv member) Tom Nather also has a session coming up.

Configuring Single Sign-On in BusinessObjects XI 3.1
Date: Tuesday, April 27
Time: 11:00 AM (ET)
Duration: 1 hour

This Webcast will cover tips and tricks for successful configuration of Single Sign-On with Windows Active Directory. Attendees will learn how Cleveland Clinic partnered with IT security to seek approval, then worked with system engineers to configure domain controllers, and then the BusinessObjects servers to work with Windows AD.

Come and learn the “what to change” and the proper order to make those changes to get this configured and working with InfoView, WebIntelligence (OpenDocument), Query as a WebService/Xcelsius and Dashboard Builder.

Webcast participants will:

• Learn tips and tricks. The SAP white paper gives general directions, and great examples but there are tips and tricks we learned that are not very clear in the white paper.
• Hear best practices. This presentation will attempt to show what we learned as we established the connection from the domain controllers to the BusinessObjects servers.
• See how we got other domains (trusted domain, but not the default domain) integrated into our BusinessObjects deployment.
• Take away a copy of the white paper and our excel spreadsheet check list for success.
• View all the information available from a single KB article.
• See a demo of the finished product.

Speaker: Tom Nather, Cleveland Clinic

If neither of these subjects draws your attention, there are several other sessions scheduled in April that might be more useful depending on your circumstances and interests. ASUG members can go back and replay prior webinars as well, so if you can’t make the specific schedule as posted you can still benefit from the information.

The ASUG board of directors announced that they intend to open a new seat dedicated to a Business Objects customer. This board position is intended to be filled by a customer that is not running any SAP enterprise products but has heavily invested in Business Objects technology. If you are a dedicated Business Objects customer and have a high-level executive that would be interested in sharing your viewpoint with the rest of the board and ensuring that your voice is heard then ASUG wants to hear from you.

I am no longer a member of the GBN steering committee. I didn’t get fired there just isn’t a need for that group anymore. However, ASUG has asked each of the steering committee members to stay on in a new role: I am now a Global Ambassador for Business Objects within ASUG. Or something like that. There were some details about the new ambassador program released at the planning meeting, but I expect that a more formal press release might be coming out at some point once the program has more details. In an interesting twist the global ambassadors (former steering committee members) have also been granted SAP Mentor status, which I already had. I certainly feel that’s a positive step because in my experience the Mentor program has remained primarily focused on the SAP enterprise products. The amount of content related to “classic” Business Objects products and services has been in the minority.

There were several activities going on in parallel during the summit. One group was focused on finalizing the selections for the spring ASUG conference which is co-located with SAPPHIRE in Orlando. Another group was working on plans for year-round content such as webinars. There were discussions about the influence councils. (I asked about the results from the Web Intelligence influence council from last year and was told it was essentially done and was being reviewed by the legal department. Hopefully we’ll see something soon.) I am assuming that a next step will be to request abstracts for the fall conference and repeat the planning process for that event.

I did a bit of work tonight on BOB to remove the GBN logo from the user profile screen. It has been replaced by an ASUG profile icon instead. I also swapped out the GBN logo from the sidebar of my blog and replaced it with the ASUG logo and a link to the organization home page. This will be my last blog post that gets the “GBN” tag as well.