I feel very lucky to be working at Maxima, planning and delivering our Cloud products and services, at this most interesting time in the IT industry, and against the background of an economic climate that is causing many businesses to re-think their business model and re-examine their costs. I can’t help thinking that out of the turmoil will emerge some truly great UK businesses that will revitalise the economy.
Following on from my blog about installing the SAP Business Intelligence Platform 4.0 last month, I thought I'd do a similar piece on installing the new SAP Data Services release. Like that earlier post there are a lot of very similar looking screenshots in here but, unlike the Information Platform Install, this is all quite a bit more convoluted so I'll be splitting it over a number of post. At present I'm thinking about three blogs:
i) Installing the Information Platform Services foundation necessary for a standalone SAP Data Services 4.0 Install
ii) Installing the standalone SAP Data Services 4.0 environment
iii) Configuring SAP Data Services 4.0 integration with an existing SAP Business Intelligence Platform which allows a single point of user security for both reporting and ETL as well as facilitating the integrated metadata management.
Maxima has a wealth of skills in Oracle technology and support many organisations core Oracle systems. As a result, we frequently find organisations with critical business applications developed with Oracle Forms and Reports. These environments were developed years ago, are often unsupported and the customer has minimal in-house skills left to support and develop user requests to keep the solution relevant to modern business processes. Even though the customer has made a valuable investment over many years in the business processes and functionality inherent within the Oracle Forms and Reports application, at this point the customer is considering replacing the Oracle Forms and Reports system with a new “off-the-shelf” fully supported system. Whilst this is the sensible route in some instances, it can be the case that the current Oracle Forms and Reports application largely meets business needs and is sufficiently bespoke or complex to meet unique requirements that there is no obvious ROI in changing along with all the risk and disruption that ensues.
Growing your company can be frought with difficulties. We look at how you can successfully overcome the challenge.
Taking your business to the next level through expansion is a gamble. You hope that the untapped customer demand creates revenue faster than your suppliers want paying for helping you build the infrastructure. If the demand is there, then you keep ahead in the cash-flow stakes. But if the growth fails to arrive on time, a lack of working capital can take a business down.
In my last blog I wrote about using SQL to build comma separated lists of values within groups of data. I'm going to continue on a similar theme here.
Very often, when being asked for data outputs, I get supplied with a list which I can use to restrict the rows returned in a SQL query. That may be a list of accounts, manager codes, asset class values, category ids or some other such list of values. They will usually be sent via email either as an excel spreadsheet or as a simple text list (each value on a new line rather than being comma separated). To make it useable, I need to have that data, either in a table or as a comma separated list. For just a few values, I'll manually add commas and remove carriage returns but as the lists increase in size, this becomes a tedious job and subject to error. There is a variety of ways to solve this, but the solution that I tend to use is a little bit of Visual basic for Applications (VBA) within Microsoft Word. This blog is going to review four options.
A perennial issue for Business Objects Upgrades since the first XI release in 2004 has been those businesses who simply don't think they can abandon their old style desktop reporting clients. At that first XI release there was no desktop reporting tool, with Business Objects apparently confident that their new XI InfoView portal would satisfy all needs. By XI r2, Desktop Intelligence was returned and folk who didn't want to move into the world of browser based reporting could sleep easy. At the same time, however, it was clear with every service pack that more functionality was being introduced into the Web Intelligence reporting product whilst Desktop Intelligence was effectively a frozen product. In XI r3, SAP introduced the Web Intelligence client install as a clear replacement for the still available Desktop Intelligence. With the new 4.0 release however, the gloves are apparently off. There is no Desktop Intelligence in the launch release and none planned in the product roadmap. What next for traditional Business Objects thick client users then? Well, this blog argues, the latest 4.0 Web Intelligence Desktop client should provide a more than adequate compensation. Indeed, it's almost as if reports of the death of Desktop Intelligence have, it seems, been overdone – it's still there, you can work locally without connection to a repository and the latest 4.0 tool to do so is greatly enhanced but let's not forget the issues that raises.
The new SAP Business Objects 4.0 Enterprise Platform is finally available so it's perhaps useful to run through the basic installation process. The documentation from SAP is, of course, comprehensive but this blog is aiming to distil that down to the basics. Warning- there are a lot of very similar screen shots in here.
In the last couple of years I have come across a similar approach to Universe Design that I have found both a little curious and slightly frustrating. Now I’m not going to go into what a Context/Alias is and when is an appropriate time to use either, but suffice to say I am very much from the school of thought that both have appropriate uses and neither one should be avoided. Simply put, use the right tool for the right job (that’s for another post if anyone is interested, but Dave Rathbun’s BO Blogs here cover this topic comprehensively).
After recently presenting on the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Dashboards and Visualisation tools one area that I did not spend much time on was Crystal Reports. After spending time reviewing the 4.0 release in more detail and watching last month's SAP Business Analytics webinar I thought I would muse over the Crystal Reports release for 4.0 and 2011. This blog entry is intended to outline the differences between them as an aid to help you decide which to choose.
So, it's almost August 2011 and we're still waiting for the general availability of the new SAP Business Objects 4.0 platform. At Maxima, we've been getting used to the Ramp Up release for a while now and I've been paying particular attention to the new Information Design Tool. It doesn't replace the Universe Designer as such but, if you were building a new data source for your WebIntelligence, Crystal or Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius...I'll stop saying that soon!), then the IDT is where you'd start. The headline news is that it allows for federated data sources where the traditional Universes have only ever allowed a single source system but there is lots more detail in the tool than that. This blog focuses on the new Data Profiling capability.
Well that’s my summer holidays over with. What to start the second half of 2011 with? How about something interesting, new, nice and free from Microsoft? The Microsoft BI Labs are a relatively recent innvoation to their main BI site (found here) ) and are described as "a collection of experimental business intelligence projects and useful applications made available from internal sources across Microsoft." Nothing in here is a product as such but it will hopefully build to form a useful collection of materials showcasing what's possible with the Microsoft BI suite and, ideally, triggering inspirational activity in real world deployments. Already there's a useful SQL Server Reporting Services Log Viewer and MDX formatter but, for this blog, I'm going to focus on one of their PowerPivot application demos – Analytics for Twitter.
IBM’s thought leadership whitepaper on trust, reliability and security decisions when choosing the right model for your business for example:
How easy would it be to lose your service if a denial of service attack is launched within your cloud provider?
Will you suffer a data security breach when an administrator can access multiple stores of data within the virtualised environment they are controlling?
Could you lose your service when an investigation into data loss of another customer starts to affect your privacy and data?
When man landed on the moon (if you are a believer, still cannot understand why they don’t just point a telescope at one of the landing sites and stop those who doubt it) there was over 200 known problems with the astronauts space suits alone. So if you are worried about a transition to cloud computing surely the challenge is less daunting, and even better, you do not run the risk of your insides being sucked out! It is fair to say that no one knows the full extent of the challenges and risks of moving to cloud in every situation.
For the survivors in the city of Sendai and its surrounding coastal region, now dealing with the loss of loved ones, homes and livelihoods, the immediate prospect is – of course - bleak. Despite this, Western journalists have been impressed by the stoicism and determination displayed by the local population. There’s a Japanese proverb that translates as ‘fall down seven times, get up eight’, and we’re certainly seeing this resilience in how Japanese people have behaved in the face of catastrophe.
UK: +44(0)118 923 5150 
Scotland: +44(0)141 880 1000