Mobility was another subject that was emphasized during the keynote. Various studies were quoted that suggested that within a few years almost every customer will have at least one mobile app, and by 2015 mobile development projects will outweigh desktop projects by a ratio of four to one. I get that, but so does SAP. I believe it was Steve Lucas (or perhaps Vishal Sikka) who said at a recent event that “Mobile is the new desktop.” I found that most folks at this event believe that MicroStrategy is currently ahead of SAP’s mobility offerings. (That’s probably not a surprise, given the venue.) The primary advantage that they have over SAP is the fact that everything has grown organically, so integration is already there. SAP is still trying to work to get Web Intelligence and Xcelsius and other content delivered to the iPad in a seamless fashion. They’re making progress, but it’s not like MicroStrategy is waiting for them to catch up either.

Both vendors (SAP and MicroStrategy) are making a lot of noise about the cloud. I can see where this would be very attractive, especially for a smaller or mid-sized company. The ability to spin up a project with minimal (or no) investment in hardware would save money but more importantly allow faster time to delivery for the project. They did a good job of spinning that advantage during the keynote, but I don’t think it needs that much “spin” to show the advantages. There wasn’t anything super exciting about this that I haven’t also seen from SAP.

After the keynote we had another nice lunch (again, the food and service at this event reminded me of the way things used to work at Business Objects events) and then it was time for some track sessions. Overall I found this event did not have very many deep-dive technical sessions, and I really missed the labs that are available at Business Objects events.

I attended one session on data “mashups” that reminded me a lot of the features provided on the bi.ondemand.com cloud site. I did pick up a few new sites that are interesting sources for public data. For example, we looked at garbage collection statistics from NYCOpenData. MicroStrategy offers direct interfaces to any URL-enabled data source but also Twitter, FourSquare, and of course Facebook. Another site that provides open data is InfoChimps.

I went to a few other sessions on day 2 and more on the morning of day 3, but nothing that I really want to cover in detail. As I’ve mentioned (more than once) I felt that at least for me this event did not offer enough deep-dive technical content. Even when a talk was interesting (see the notes about the LinkedIn talk from day 1) they often didn’t offer much about MicroStrategy.

But I did get a t-shirt.

I have had a couple of people ask me (offline) if I’m leaving Business Objects and working with MicroStrategy now. Rest assured the answer is no, I am not. But I’m excited about the opportunity to get my hands on another tool, especially when both tools have strengths. Ultimately it’s about getting data to end users in a format that they can use to improve the business, so why not have more than one choice? In fact it has been over a year since I renamed my blog from “Adventures in Business Objects” to “Adventures in Business Intelligence” in order to be able to talk about different ideas like this. I’m nowhere near as fluent in MSTR as I am in BOBJ, but I hope to fix that over the coming years. We’ll see how that goes.

That being said, try to find a bottle of water, or even a water cooler, anywhere around the place. It’s nearly impossible. I finally found some water late yesterday afternoon, after asking a number of different conference folks and getting blank looks or, “I think I saw some over there, somewhere…” comments. The wireless has been good, although it ironically dropped out (at least for me) in the room I went to for the mobility track. That track is all the way on the end of the hotel, so perhaps they need another access point.

Not only are they not handing out survey forms during the sessions, but they’re not scanning our badges as we enter the rooms. Again, for a data company I find that surprising.

But what about the content? Yesterday I attended three sessions. The first was a joint session between Teradata and eBay. The Teradata folks talked about their generic concepts for “big data” and how to let analysts make the best use of it. The eBay gentleman then talked about some specifics around how they work with their large data sources (petabytes of data). It was interesting but I didn’t see a lot of MicroStrategy stuff, just big data stuff. Next I went to a session delivered by LinkedIn. I found it to be more interesting because in this case they talked about data quality issues that I can certainly related to. BOB is nowhere near as big as LinkedIn (they have 135MM users at this point) but we still have consistency issues. For example, the presenter asked the audience how many ways we thought the job title of “Software Engineer” appeared in their database. The majority of the guesses were very low compared to the actual value of over 6,000. They have over 8,000 different iterations of the company name IBM! As you can imagine, searching is a big challenge for LinkedIn. As I said, the talk was interesting, but at the end the presenter had not talked about MicroStrategy or shown a single product during the entire talk! In fact that was the first question from the audience, “How are you using MicroStrategy in your environment?”

The last session I attended (the aforementioned mobility track) was given by a presenter from Lowes Hardware. Lowes is a big user of MicroStrategy products. (In fact their former CIO is now apparently in charge of the cloud for MicroStrategy.) He was by far the most engaging presenter and he powered through his session even after the failure of the audio equipment in the room. Lowes has purchased over 40,000 iPhones and has apparently bet big on that hardware platform along with the mobile products from MicroStrategy. He gave a great example… every store manager used to spend a few minutes each morning jotting down some notes from a sales report in order to have that information with him or her at any point throughout the day. Just a few minutes a day, but it was something they did essentially every day. The replaced the report delivery (and hand notations) with a mobile app and eliminated those few minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? They estimated that the savings (I assume based on average pay for store managers) at only $6.84. I think I have that number correct, if I’m wrong it’s not by much. When that savings was multiplied by the number of managers across all stores, and then multiplied again by the number of days in a year, the total productivity savings came out to $4.3 million dollars. Per year. Talk about a quick return on investment, yes?

The app was cool, but I wanted to know more about how it was built, what tools were used, and what the process looked like. So far the sessions I’ve attended have been very light on specifics, so I hope I pick better sessions today. Will let you know tomorrow.

I will be kicking off January with the next post in my “becoming a blogger” series. I will be starting off my conference season for 2012 by attending MicroStrategy World later that month followed by attendance (and speaking) at the BI 2012 event at the end of February. I’m delivering several track sessions at BI 2012, including co-teaching a primer on universe design with Michael Welter.

But until then, best of wishes to everyone for a happy and healthy new year.

Here’s a really simple example: I want to ensure that a user enters an end date that is at or beyond the entered start date value. This validation rule is designed to avoid confusion since many databases will not return any rows for a “backwards” between operation. (It’s also a fairly common request, found as far back as 2006 in this topic on BOB and again 2008.) I can think of two ways to make this work. First, enforce the prompt entry order so that the user cannot enter the second date before they enter the first date, and give me some way to reference their first entered date in the list of values (LOV) for the second date. By making the second prompt constrained I would force the user to pick from the list of dates, and by referencing the first date in the LOV I can ensure that the only dates that show up do actually occur after the first date. This is technically probably easier to implement, but not the preferred solution.

A second option would be to allow me to create validation rules that fire after all of the prompts have been entered. This is far more flexible as it allows the user to respond to prompts in any order they would like (as it works today) but the validation is done before the query is sent to the database. This could be far harder to implement, primarily because I envision some form of validation language (VB? Crystal?) would be required. Do they invent some new language, or try to implement something that already exists? What if the language is not supported on all platforms? The date example that I have used so far seems fairly trivial: the rule would simply be end_date >= start_date which doesn’t look that complicated. It looks like an expression rather than a language, but a language is more than that. A full-blown language can have a grammar, reserved words, and all sorts of rules that specify how the various components can be compared.

Does my prompt validation language allow looping structures? I might want to be able to loop through a list of selected items in the case where a prompt offers more than one value. “Make sure all of the end dates are greater than or equal to the latest selected start date” would be one example. First I have to parse the list of start date values to find the largest entry, and then I have to process the list of end dates to make sure that 100% of them exceed the largest start date.

Doesn’t look so simple any more, does it?

Any prompt validation logic would also have to ensure that validation loops don’t exist. Here I have defined validation rules on each entry that can be true individually but can never be true collectively. This is actually a data entry or coding error but I need to be able to check and react to that.

• Rule 1 on the start date: Make sure that the start date is greater than the end date.
• Rule 2 on the end date: Make sure that the end date is greater than the start date.

Can the start date be greater than the end date at the same time the end date is greater than the start date? Probably not. Since only one of those two rules could ever be true at a given time the query would never run. With three (or even more) prompts the potential complexity for validation loops only gets worse.

How Might Simple Validation Logic Work?

As a universe designer I am charged with creating components of code that ultimately will be placed together in some random fashion by a query writer. I have no idea what sort of questions they’re going to want to answer, nor should I be constrained by that concern. I should be able to make prompt objects that function perfectly fine by themselves, but also in combination with other prompts. The “start date / end date” example I started with is very simple. Consider this syntax:

some_table.some_date between @prompt('Enter Start Date','D',,mono,validate:&1<&2) and @prompt('Enter End Date','D',,mono,validate:&1<&2)

What I have done here is supplement the "free/constrained/primary_key" option with a new feature: validate. The syntax breaks down like this:

The < character is providing a simple validation expression "less than" using a standard mathematical symbol. Other options might include >, >=, <=, ==, and !=. These are all single-value operators that would not support a multi-selection prompt, and the scope of the &1 and &2 doesn't extend beyond this particular prompt object, but it's a start.

Named Prompt Components

In order to extend my validation scope beyond a single prompt I need to ensure that I have a unique name that I can reference. (As an aside, this is why class names must be unique within a universe structure. The class name\object name combination must be unique within the universe in order to support the @Select() functionality.) To do this, I might extend my new prompt syntax with the following:

I have introduced two new arguments. The extra argument &0 will allow me to define a unique name for this prompt, and &n:name allows me to reference that value in another prompt. Now I can create two separate prompts that look like this:

Start date check
some_table.some_date >= @prompt('Enter Start Date','D',,mono,validate:&0:start_date&n:start_date<=&n:end_date)

End date check
some_table.some_date <= @prompt('Enter End Date','D',,mono,validate:&0:end_date&n:start_date<=&n:end_date)

Keeping in mind that it is entirely likely that I would have more than one start date or end date in my universe, I would have to use more verbose prompt names like account_start_date or invoice_range_start_date and so on. In the above example I have two prompts, each has a name, and each has a validation rule. By allowing prompts to have names I can reference the result of one prompt inside of another prompt.

Event Triggers

The next challenge could be to determine when the validation logic fires. Does it fire at the end of each prompt selection? I can't really see that working because all of the required values might not yet be defined (selected). Does the validation logic fire when the query is executed? That also might not make sense because if I have a chain of three prompts where 3 depends on 2 and 2 depends on 1 I should be able to trigger the validation as soon as any two values are present. In my simple "start date / end date" example it would be easy to say that the validation logic fires as soon as both values are present. I also haven't addressed how to create the message that is delivered to the user if the prompt validation fails...

Most of the complexity in this process comes from the fact that I'm trying to design a fully generic solution. I don't want to have to write new code for each new prompt screen that I might design, I want to create reusable logic and syntax that works across the entire universe. I think it's easy to see why this is such a complex question, and perhaps indicates why we don't have anything like it so far within the universe.

But being able to set up a date value like "today" as a dynamic default value... that should be easier to implement. I hope we see that... and soon.

But this morning I read an article from Time.com suggesting that we might be looking at the beginning of the end for Facebook. I am not going to summarize the article here, but I would like to run an informal poll.

If you are a member of Facebook, are you using it:

• More now than you did last year?
• Less now than you did last year?
• About the same as what you did last year?

Please use the comment form below to enter your response.

Here’s a screen shot of the fail I noticed. Have a look at some of the tweets.

How many of them are about the weather versus something else?

First I see a person from Garland (not far away from me) who is tweeting what appears to be various national headlines, including one about the real estate situation in Florida. Apparently there are “clouds on the horizon.” Does that have anything to do with weather in my area? No, but it does have a key word “clouds” included.

I like the next example even more. We certainly have clouds here in Texas, but I can’t remember the last time we had a blizzard. Yet someone from Lewisville, Texas, just a few miles up the road from me, is tweeting his disappointment about being left out of (again I’m assuming) a beta program for the game company Blizzard Entertainment and their next incarnation of the Diablo game series. Yes, there is a weather-related keyword in that tweet, but would it not make sense to tie key words to geographical areas? The odds of having a blizzard in Texas (the weather kind, at least) are slim.

This is part of what makes text analytics so difficult. Business Objects purchased a company several years ago (Inxight) that delivers text analytics; this product is now a part of the Data Services product line. It would be interesting to see if they have a feature that would allow me to tie geo-location services to keywords so that I could discount tweets mentioning blizzards in Texas, or hurricanes in Alaska.

Ultimately it comes down to context. When I read those tweets, I can immediately see that they’re not really talking about the weather, even if they do have weather-related keywords. Apparently it’s still challenging for software to do the same thing. Then again, it’s hard enough to predict the weather correctly, so maybe I can forgive them a few errant tweets.

For the next few weeks, board members will see the logo rotate between alternate versions such as these:

And of course this:

During the American Thanksgiving week we used this:

Now I do realize that some of these logos are not necessarily going to reflect the global nature of our community. For example, the snowflake probably doesn’t make much sense to our friends below the equator. So that’s where this post comes in to play.

If you have a minimal amount of graphical talent (or even a lot!) and would like to have your work immortalized as a part of our community, here is your chance! Come up with a seasonal logo – it does not have to be for the end of year holiday season, it can be anything you like. For example, how about a special logo for talk like a pirate day?

Come up with a logo, and as long as it meets certain standards of taste (I don’t think I need to list the obvious issues here) we’ll consider adding your seasonal logo to the rotation next year. Until Google opens their next competition to design a Google Doodle, this could be your shot at Internet fame. Go for it.

How do you submit an idea? Check out this topic on BOB for more details.

Related Links

• What is a Google Doodle?

I thought I would go into more depth here since I’m not bound by editorial constraints as far as post length.

My personal experience is certainly weighted on the legacy Business Objects side. I’ve been working with the products since 1995 and have seen quite a progression during the last sixteen years. Keep that in mind as you read this post as I am sure it gives me a certain bias. The question of the day: Is there is an adequate supply of Business Objects experts with SAP expertise? Does that question even make sense?

Over the years I have seen far more Business Objects installations that are departmental or functional rather than enterprise wide. I see the same thing today with Microsoft products taking over a lot of the smaller to mid-sized BI projects that may have picked Business Objects in previous years. SAP, on the other hand, is by default at the enterprise level. I don’t think I ever saw a company that intended to run ERP systems from both SAP and Oracle at the same time, but I saw plenty of clients that were running Business Objects, Cognos, Microstrategy, or any of the above in various combinations. Business Intelligence just wasn’t seen as an enterprise asset, at least in the early days. Where does that leave us today? I think it might help to review where we came from and then see how that has impacted the current job / skills market.

Historical Perspective: Business Objects Careers

I started working with Business Objects in 1995 and since then I’ve seen a lot of interesting twists and turns along the way. In the old days there wasn’t much to a Business Objects installation, thus the concept of “departmental BI” that I mentioned above. We had universe developers, report developers, and users. The only “enterprise” bits were the repository (which often went to the DBA team) and the scheduler (which went to the Windows network administrators because it required a windows server to function). That was it. In fact the very first version of Business Objects that I worked with combined the “supervisor” functionality right into the reporting system. If you logged in to BusinessObjects with a specific username and password then you could set up users and change their passwords and so on.

Even the fact that the company name (Business Objects with a space) and the product name (BusinessObjects no space) were essentially the same should show how simple (and small!) things were back then. When we walked to school. In the snow. Uphill both ways, and all of that.

Because the required skill set was much smaller it was not unusual to find a true “soup to nuts” Business Objects expert in those days. When I started with Integra Solutions we only had four people in the entire company. Due to our diverse but overlapping backgrounds in databases, networking, and desktop applications we became one of the top Business Objects partners before Business Objects had a partner program (or even realized that they needed one).

Fast forward about a decade and by then Business Objects had introduced a true enterprise platform that ran on Windows, Unix, or a heterogeneous cluster (a combination of both). The administrative side of the equation was quite a bit more complex and required a broader skill set than before. We had both desktop and a web clients that could be used to build reports. Of course at first they were dramatically different and experience in one did not directly translate to the other. To further complicate matters Business Objects purchased Crystal which then meant there was a third reporting option that many folks didn’t understand. Eventually we saw a completely new server architecture (with the XI release) that was based on Crystal code. At this point finding a “soup to nuts” expert was just about impossible simply because the skills required to manage a complete Business Objects installation were so much broader in scope. So even before the SAP acquisition the consulting marketplace was becoming more and more fragmented.

Often the infrastructure team would install and configure the software, but these folks would not be able to write a report of any kind. A report developer might know Crystal, Desktop Intelligence (the new name of the original BusinessObjects desktop product), Web Intelligence, or some combination of all three. However, it was fairly rare to find someone with deep experience across the whole suite simply because for years Crystal and Business Objects had been competitors. (Somewhere along the way we also acquired Xcelsius which was yet another new and different platform.) Many report writers didn’t have a clue about developing a universe, or were in fact isolated from that part of the team. Universe development remained relatively stable from 1996 (the introduction of the “original” 4.0 release) until this time simply because the universe designer tool didn’t change that much. Ironically we have just recently seen the formal release of a dramatically different universe builder with the “new” 4.0 release. Universe designers finally have some new toys to play with.

Today we are several years into the SAP acquisition. There are SAP people that are trying to learn Business Objects, and Business Objects people trying to learn SAP. Who is the best suited for a particular application? It’s a question that I don’t think has a simple answer. Much like Crystal versus Web Intelligence, SAP was initially a competitor – or if not a competitor at least they were not always considered complementary – for Business Objects. SAP partners had no compelling reason to develop expertise in the technology simply because it was not commonly requested. SAP had BEx and BW and was deeply invested in those technologies. In all the years I spent as a Business Objects consultant I don’t think I ever once was asked to report on SAP data.

After SAP purchased Business Objects, some SAP partners went out and purchased Business Objects partners in order to get a jump start on the technology. Did that help?

The point of all of this background is that it does not surprise me at all to hear that folks are saying that there is a shortage of SAP + Business Objects skills. I expect it will continue for some time. Why?

Earlier I talked about the fact that SAP is by default an enterprise application while Business Objects does not have to be.

I feel that it’s far more likely that an SAP shop would now be interested in Business Objects experience than the other way around. Any Business Objects shop that is not already an SAP ERP customer is probably not likely to dump their current solution for SAP; it’s a far more costly decision than the other way around. So let me instead provide some thoughts about SAP shops. I would expect one of two situations: Either it’s an SAP shop that already had Business Objects experts in house because of other reporting systems / solutions or data sources outside of SAP, or it’s an SAP shop that had zero Business Objects presence prior to the merger.

Departmental Versus Enterprise

Earlier I brought up the concept of departmental BI. I think this is the first obstacle to finding or building people with deep SAP and Business Objects skills. I’ve heard more than one person talk about Business Objects as “departmental BI” because it could be implemented fairly easily. Department X would implement Business Objects while Department Y would implement Cognos, all based on their own preferences. Business Objects did not require an enterprise installation in order to be successful. That means there could easily be different expertise scattered throughout a company. I saw this many, many times during my years as a Business Objects consultant.

On the other hand, SAP — almost by definition — has to be enterprise. You won’t find Finance implementing Oracle Financials and manufacturing implementing SAP. It just doesn’t happen.

Given that, let me go back to the first scenario I mentioned earlier: an SAP installation with Business Objects as departmental BI. Suppose that the two groups are under different management. Suppose that the Finance group has long used Business Objects for reporting outside of SAP, and they already have extracts and databases and universes and everything else in place to support that. They roll up to the CFO, who may or may not have a good working relationship with the CIO who is over the SAP group. Where is the incentive for a Business Objects expert from the finance group to train an SAP expert? Or vice versa? In each case, I have to imagine that each feels the other is trying to take over their job. The Business Objects person would want to say, “Just get me to the data, I’ll take care of the rest.” The SAP person would say, “I have the data where I want it, I just need to know how to write the reports and build my dashboards.” In each case there could be a definite sense of encroachment from the other side, and a certain resistance to making that collaboration work. This scenario could play out with internal employees or external consultants. Each is trying to protect their own territory and maintain their business purpose. Once either of them becomes an expert in “the other side” then one side becomes superfluous, and nobody wants that in today’s market. In this case it’s a political rather than technical obstacle.

Take another case. Remember that SAP is typically thought of as “big” (their Business One solution not withstanding) and “big” typically means lots of people. From a human resources perspective it’s going to be considered more appropriate to try to cross train an existing surplus of folks (SAP) than hire specific experts (Business Objects) and bring on more resources. Everything today is about cutting costs, right? So take your existing SAP BW folks and make them multipurpose to avoid costs of new people. This can be done through cross-pollination with an existing group within the company (subject to the political concerns listed above), training, or temporarily hiring a Business Objects consultant. If you’re going to hire that consultant, though, wouldn’t you want them to have at least a passing knowledge of SAP so they don’t go “huh?” when you mention cubes? Thus, the perception that the BW folks are going to want their Business Objects experts to have at least some SAP knowledge is an easy leap to make. There’s a financial obstacle to getting the right people on board.

And of course I haven’t even touched on the technical issues. With XI 3.1 there are certainly some enhancements as far as how to integrate the two packages, but in my opinion they’re still really on “separate-but-not-quite-equal” footing. It’s not until BI 4.0 that we really see good integration, which means until BI 4.0 has been out in the market for some period of time, there simply isn’t a good platform to develop integrated skills. That gives us a technical obstacle to overcome in addition to any political / financial issues I’ve already mentioned.

An SAP shop with no existing internal Business Objects experts would potentially have a benefit here, as they can at least try to hire a consulting partner to come up to speed. But where did those partners get their experience?

Does Any Of This Really Matter?

Given all of these obstacles, why are SAP shops going to prefer someone with SAP skills on the Business Objects side? If you’re going to report from BW cubes and use Web Intelligence, then the report writer doesn’t need to know how the cube is built any more than they had to know how the universe was built. But if you want your report writer to also be able to talk intelligently to the cube folks and make appropriate requests for enhancements that would improve the report, then yes, they should have some background. There might be “best practices” as to how to build your cubes in order to leverage (or at least avoid pitfalls in) features of Web Intelligence, Crystal, Xcelsius, or any other new tool that they have available now. There’s also the “huh” factor I mentioned above, where if you hire an expert / consultant you really do not want to have to train them on how to access your data.

A Brief Aside

Here’s a tidbit from me personal experience: Last year I spoke at TechEd. My topic was intended to show “Business Objects for the rest of us.” My opening remarks went something along these lines:

If you are big enough to run SAP, then I can almost guarantee that you have non-SAP data that you want to report on. Yes, Business Objects has done quite a bit since the acquisition to make it easier to implement their tools on top of SAP, but what about those other data sources?

From there I went on to say that I was not going to talk about cubes, but instead would show how Business Objects works outside of an SAP environment. The goal was to give attendees some information they could take home and start thinking about how to use their new toys against those “other” databases.

The first question I got at the end of my session was about implementing BOBJ on top of cubes.

Pass The Salt

I’m currently reading a book about the history of salt in human civilization. It’s very interesting. Salt was used as a currency in many areas (and for a very long time) because of the perceived value but also the difficulty in obtaining it. A combination of deep SAP + expert Business Objects skills is probably considered extremely valuable right now for the same reason: it is rare and difficult to obtain. Mmm, salt. Time for a margarita.

(Disclosure: This post typed while listening to Jimmy Buffett.)

Related Links

• ASUGNews.com blog post: Wanted: SAP BusinessObjects Skills — Can Supply Meet Demand?
• YouTube recording of our conversation during the Orlando SAP Business Objects user conference

How much money will I make?

That’s often the biggest question, isn’t it? I can honestly say I have never directly made a penny off of blogging. I realize that’s not a big incentive for some folks, but it’s what you should plan for, at least for the first two years of blogging. Two years? Yes, two years at least. I believe it takes that long to build up an audience, and by virtue of having a increasingly larger audience, more traffic. In the 90’s every web site was all about the “eyeballs” or how many visitors they attracted. Eventually folks that control advertising budgets figured out that being seen wasn’t enough, they had to eventually sell something. The rules changed. It wasn’t about page views and unique visitors anymore (although those metrics are still important enough to be interesting) but about clicks and conversions.

That being said, if you want to try to make money on your blog, there are a number of advertising or affiliate programs that you can sign up for. In my experience, most will not pay very much unless you have a whole bunch of traffic. The general idea is that with a whole bunch of traffic you should generate at least a few clicks, and for every hundred clicks or so someone might actually buy something. Google offers a very easy way to start including advertising on your web site (be it a blog or something else). I have used Google on a number of different sites and ultimately dropped it because the advertising revenues were going down despite increases in traffic and clicks. I decided that the minimal income I was receiving wasn’t worth the hassle of keeping up with the program, and ultimately after fighting with Google’s support department for nine months over one particular question I just dropped out altogether.

One of my fellow BI bloggers (with a reasonably popular blog) makes about $100 to $150 via his blog. That’s not monthly, that’s for an entire year. It’s not exactly enough to pay the mortgage, but at least it covers the web hosting which makes for a break-even situation.

One side note about advertising: In my opinion, if it’s not well done, it can be a real turn-off for your readers. My suggestion to you, the aspiring blogger, is to start the process without any intention to include advertising of any kind for at least the first two years. That way you have built an audience, and hopefully they will stay with you if / when you do start to include advertising. For me, personally, the aesthetic issues of having banners or other advertisements are not worth the small amount of funds they might generate. I’ve run this site for over four years without any advertising, and I anticipate that continuing into the future. Then again, I do have a day job, so I am not depending on this site to make money. Your situation may certainly be different.

Why do it then, if not to make money?

In the last section I said I have never directly made a penny off of blogging. That is true. However, I have certainly realized many indirect benefits. Before I evolved from a consultant to a productive member of society I used my blog to publish technical articles. That helped me to maintain current clients as well as attract new ones. Clients paid the bills, so anything that helped me grow my client list was certainly beneficial.

Between my blogging and my participation on BOB I have been recognized as an SAP Mentor for the past several years. I can’t begin to list all of the indirect benefits that has provided, including the invitation to spend an hour with Hasso Plattner (one of the original founders of SAP) at the SAPPHIRE conference in 2011. What a treat that was!

I have been invited to present at conferences I might not normally have attended, like the Mastering BusinessObjects conferences in Australia. (Hi Josh! ). I have been invited to several SAP events under their blogger platform, which means my travel expenses are often covered in addition to the conference fee, and that makes my boss quite happy. Anything that makes my boss happy is obviously a benefit to me.

Your mileage may vary in this, of course. But conservatively speaking, I would not expect to gain these sorts of benefits until you have a larger audience, which gets back to the two year time frame I mentioned earlier.

Ok, so I’m not making money. How much does it cost?

I touched briefly on this in my first post about becoming a blogger. There are a number of places that would love to host your blog, BI or otherwise, for free. I’ve already mentioned wordpress.com and SAP SCN. Cost: zero dollars. Since you can run a blog with no cash outlay, the concerns about generating income become less crucial.

Even if you get your own domain, you can find hosting that is very affordable. I am aware of at least one hosting company that will provide web space, a host control panel, the ability to have your own email addresses… and the entire package costs less than $5 a month. The upside is you can get your feet wet and start blogging with a minimal cash investment. The downside is that you’re often hosted on a server with hundreds (or potentially thousands) of other smaller web sites. If one or two of those sites starts getting more traffic, it can impact visitors to your site. Or if you start getting a lot of traffic your host may ask you (nicely, at first) to upgrade to a more expensive package since you are using more resources. Unfortunately it can turn out to be the luck of the draw as to whether you are on an overloaded server or not.

What about that domain name? Anything I should consider?

Once you’ve decided to go the separate hosting route, how do you pick a domain, and how much do they cost?

You can get your own domain from any variety of sources for $7 to $12 per year. When I got my first domain it was $50 per year! Finding a good domain name has become harder since many of the good names or combinations of key words are already taken. There is an entire industry dedicated to grabbing new or expiring domain names and then “squatting” on them, hoping someone will want to eventually buy them. (There are reports that Apple paid a fortune for the iCloud.com domain name. Something in the order of millions of dollars. ) However, that doesn’t mean you can’t find something available. I get asked all the time what “dagira” means, and how it’s pronounced. I will let you know right now that you can pronounce it any way you like. (I personally say it with a hard “g” sound.) The domain name is made up of the first two letters of my name (Dave), the first two letters of my wife’s name (Ginger), and the first two letters of my last name (Rathbun). Da-Gi-Ra, that’s all there is to it. What does it mean? Whatever I want it to.

One of the advantages of a “nonsense” domain like this is that they’re easy to get. Nobody else would register dagira.com because it doesn’t mean anything. Most three or four letter domains are gone because of company acronyms, but six letters is still well within the sweet spot of short (and therefore memorable) domain names. One of the bloggers that I try to visit when I have time is Jon Reed who blogs at JonERP.com. See? Six letters, easy to remember, and in Jon’s case it’s a combination of his first name and the blog topic he covers.

Hm, I just checked, and DaveBI.com is available. Maybe I should grab it.

How do you check to see if a domain name is available? Go to any domain registrar web site and they’ll have a way to check which domain names are available, or if not, they will often suggest alternatives. GoDaddy.com is one example, and one of the original domain registrars Network Solutions is another option.

Ok, so what makes a good domain name?

Shorter is better. People can remember short and succinct domain names better than something like DaveTalksAboutBusinessIntelligenceAtHisBlog.com.

Many folks will tell you that your domain name should include key phrases that will also be found in your blog posts. That would make BusinessIntelligence.com quite attractive (and in fact it’s already taken). However, there is also a risk in this strategy that should be considered. What happens if the industry focus changes? Years ago we talked about Executive Information Systems, or EIS. I don’t hear people using that phrase much anymore. After that we built Decision Support Systems, or DSS. That, too, has become less in vogue. Who is to say that “business intelligence” won’t follow the same trend? SAP has already started using “business analytics” instead of intelligence.

For similar reasons I suggest you that avoid using product names as a part of your domain name. First of all you have to deal with the potential attention of the trademark holder for that product! I believe that the court system in the United States has upheld the right for folks to register “productnamesucks.com” under freedom of speech rights but that’s probably not an attractive domain for blogging, at least not if you intend to say things in a positive fashion. Nowadays internet savvy companies will reserve domain names like that ahead of time, rather than waiting for customers to get them instead. Even if a domain is available, it’s possible that – depending on how you use it – you could end up losing the domain due to a trademark complaint. In my opinion, it’s just not not worth the potential legal hassle. You may notice that “Business Objects” does not directly appear in the URL for BOB, and in fact the hosting domain has nothing to do with anything other that discussion forums.

Perhaps more importantly, however, is that product names can change. I can only imagine how my friend Mico felt when she learned that SAP was going to (at least try to) drop the product name Xcelcius after she had spent so much time building her brand at EverythingXcelsius.com. That’s something that was completely out of her control, and now she has to work out a strategy to deal with the results.

One last item about selecting a domain name: Make sure your selected phrase doesn’t have unintended meanings! For example, is this ExpertsExchange.com or ExpertSexChange.com? And then there is the domain for Pen Island aka www.penisland.com … and yes, that’s a real working web site. Fortunately it’s about making pens. If you have any doubts as to what your domain could potentially imply, it is easy enough to write the domain down in all lower or all upper case letters and let your friends check it out. I even checked “dagira” using the Google translation service to make sure it wasn’t a nasty word in other languages.

I have some ideas about domain names, anything else I should consider?

Yes! In this day and age, you should be sure to check to see if the Twitter handle associated with your domain name is available, and probably Facebook as well. I did not register “dagira” as a Twitter handle when it first came out, and I wish I had. Unfortunately it belongs to someone else, so I got “dagira_tweets” instead. I don’t do Facebook at all, so I didn’t even bother to check there.

You should also consider registering the .org and .net and perhaps even the .mobi version of your selected domain name. I registered “forumtopics.com” years ago when we needed a host domain for BOB. I did not think about registering the other versions until later, and by then forumtopics.net was taken. Why does any of this matter? If you’re in this for the long haul, you’re going to be building a brand. Your brand will be far easier to recognize if you use it consistently across various social platforms, and right now that means primarily Twitter and perhaps Facebook.

Should you use your name as your brand? You could, but remember that one of the suggestions I made in my last post about becoming a blogger was that you might want to have more than one blog, in case you want to cover disparate topics. Which blog gets your name, and which has to make do with something else? It’s like picking your favorite child. My name is certainly associated with my work, but it doesn’t have to be my domain name too. One of my favorite stories related to this goes back even before the founding of BOB. I was at the Business Objects conference in Washington D. C. with some coworkers. We sat down at a table for lunch, and one of them turned to the gentleman already seated and introduced herself as being from Integra Solutions. His response made my day, my week, my year. He said, “Ah, Integra Solutions, Dave Rathbun!” My recognition was directly related to the amount of time I spent on the BUSOB-L LISTSERV mailing list, where my name was my brand. It was associated with the company I worked for at the time, but I still had started building an individual brand at the same time.

If you’ve found the perfect domain name and the twitter handle isn’t available, you can still consider using it. Just recognize that you’ll have to make some concessions like I did by using “dagira_tweets” as my twitter handle.

Summary

In the first post about blogging I talked about picking a subject. In this post I talked more about the technical side of hosting your own blog, should you decide to go that route. In my next post I want to talk about exposing yourself – in a good way – to the Internet, and what that means.

Context Issue

The first issue was rather generic. The message was Automation error: The server threw an exception. It seemed to happen while the code was looping through a collection of joins or contexts for some universes, although it had never happened to me during my usage. (Of course, isn’t that always the case?) One user was able to send me a copy of their universe for my testing and I was able to recreate the error which is always the first step towards a resolution.

The error was being thrown while processing contexts to get a list of included joins. The first several contexts were processed fine, but one particular context always threw the error mentioned above. I created a very simple program that only tried to traverse the collection of contexts and it threw the same error. (The code is listed at the end of this blog post.) When programs don’t work there are generally only two issues: either the code is wrong or the data is wrong. In this case I was quite certain the code was okay so I started looking at the data.

As I reviewed the context that was causing the error I accidentally “touched” one of the joins, deselecting it from the context. I made sure I restored that join to the context before trying another test run. Imagine my surprise when the “trouble” context was processed successfully on my next test run. Of course the following context still threw the error, but the “data” for the first problem context seemed to have been cleared up. Based on those results I went back into the universe and “touched” every context. I opened each one, deselected and then re-selected a join, and then saved the universe. After doing that, the code ran without throwing any errors while processing the contexts.

I can only assume that something had gone wrong in the way the context was being stored in the universe. I assume that the universe was working okay as far as query generation, but there was something causing problems for the VBA interface. Touching each context cleared that up.

Duplicate Parameters

However that was not the last problem with the test universe provided to me. Once I got beyond the context issue a new error came up while attempting to process the universe parameters. It seemed that somehow in this particular universe each universe parameter had become replicated multiple times!

This was causing a second problem because the name (ANSI92 for example) was used as a unique key to compare the before and after versions of each parameter. I was able to go through and remove many of the duplicate entries, but I decided that I should write some code to address this particular data issue. The code that captures the parameters now captures only the first occurrence of each parameter value and ignores the rest. It could easily be redone to capture the last rather than the first but for now that’s how it works.

2.0.1 Released

Because of the issue found with duplicate parameters I am releasing version 2.0.1 of the script. Please visit the support page to download the updated version. Note that this code update does not include a fix for the context issue as I have not figured out how to address a corrupted context definition with my VBA code yet. If you are experiencing this issue, please try the “touch” process outlined above and see if that addresses your issue.

Note: comments are off for this post to avoid fragmentation of the discussion. Please post any questions about this release on the download page, thanks.

Related Information

Here is the code I wrote to try to help diagnose the issue with contexts. This code simply opens a universe and lists all of the joins assigned to each context. It should work perfectly fine as long as the data is valid.

Sub main()

    Dim boDesignerApp As Designer.Application
    Dim boContexts As Designer.Contexts
    Dim boContext As Designer.Context
    Dim boJoins As Designer.Joins
    Dim boJoin As Designer.Join

    Dim boUniv As Designer.Universe

    ' Establish a Designer session and log in
    Set boDesignerApp = New Designer.Application
    boDesignerApp.Visible = True
    Call boDesignerApp.LogonDialog
    Set boUniv = boDesignerApp.Universes.Open

    Dim strJoinSet As String

    Set boContexts = boUniv.Contexts

    For Each boContext In boContexts
        strJoinSet = ""
        iRowNum = iRowNum + 1
        Set boJoins = boContext.Joins
        For Each boJoin In boJoins
            strJoinSet = strJoinSet & ", " & boJoin.ID
        Next boJoin
        Debug.Print "Context " & boContext.Name & " has joins " & strJoinSet
        Set boJoins = Nothing
    Next boContext
    Set boContext = Nothing

End Sub