I wasn't going to be writing any more blogs about the new SAP Information Steward Metadata Management immediately but confess to being intrigued by the range of third party metadata integrators available when preparing my blog on adding new SAP integrators. In particular, as both an Oracle and SAP BI Partner, I was interested in the potential of integrating in the metadata available within Oracle BI to the SAP Information Steward. It's proven to be an interesting investigation so thought I'd put up a little blog on what's possible and what, frustratingly, seems not to be.

In my previous post I gave an overview of the Metadata Management module of the new SAP Information Steward. This provided a single directory structure for a number of Metadata Integrators providing a unified view of metadata across your BI environment. Metadata Integrators are available for a wide variety of integration points including SAP BusinessObjects, Data Services, Data Insight, CWM Models and Third Party interfaces such as Oracle Data Integrator or Microsoft SQL Server. In this blog I'm going to look at the process for setting up a new Metadata Integrator, specifically one which will gather the metadata details from an SAP Data Services Repository. The process is similar regardless of which Metadata Integrator you are setting up so hopefully of use for most scenarios.

In previous blogs about the new SAP Information Steward I've looked at the Data Profiling and Quality Scorecarding capabilities. Both are useful for developing a true picture of the quality of your data and ongoing initiatives to improve it - key requirements for any Data Governance programme. But what about the use to which that data is put? How is it transformed? Where is it deployed? What reports rely upon it? It's to answer these questions and more that SAP Information Steward also includes a Metadata Management module and this is going to be my subject for the next few blogs in this series.

When I woke up on the 8th December to the news that a huge storm was due to batter Scotland later that day with schools being closed and recommendations not to travel being issued, I felt somewhat depressed. Everyone at Maxima had put a lot of effort and research into preparing our SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Close Up Event scheduled for that day in Edinburgh and now it looked like the weather was going to decimate our audience. Happily my worries were misplaced and most folk that had signed up to attend were indeed there. I think we can put that down to the resilient nature of the Scots character and, perhaps more likely, the very real rise in interest we are seeing across the board in businesses and organisations wanting to make sure they are well equipped to delivery against Business Intelligence requirements in 2012.

SAP Information Steward is one of the more intriguing components of the recently released 4.0 Product Suite. It's positioned as an aid to Data Governance programmes providing tools to help manage data quality, resolve metadata definition conflict and plan data cleansing routines. The tool not only integrates into your existing SAP BusinessObjects environment but also other metadata sources such as Oracle Warehouse Builder. In later blogs, I'll review some of this functionality in detail but this blog will review the relatively straightforward process of installing the SAP Information Steward environment.

I've spent the morning preparing some collateral for an upcoming Maxima Webinar reviewing the SAP Enterprise Risk and Solvency Management Application for Insurance. You can register for the webinar here but I thought I'd put together this blog post to give you a few reasons why you should.

 

I have been working with two customers looking to use Xcelsius (now known as Business Objects Dashboards) for dashboarding solutions with Data driven through Business Objects. The Question arises over how to deliver the data into Xcelsius's Excel sheet for a live or scheduled solution. The 2 most commonly used approaches are using either Query as a Web Service (QAAWS) or Live Office. I wanted to look at the relative benefits of both approaches to try to deliver the most useful solution.

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.

Over the past few years where the banking industry has undergone significant upheaval, Maxima consultants have been continually engaged on a long term basis at a number of leading UK banks. This blog post is intended to provide an overview of our work at one where we were able to provide a critical data source as well as continued best practice advice on SAP Business Objects Report and Universe development. This work extended well beyond use of the standard SAP Business Objects toolset to advising on a wide range of activities such as data quality and governance and high level analysis of complex migration throughout the bank.

After recently presenting at the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 launch in Scotland hosted by Maxima I promised to provide a bit more detail about some of the features I discussed on that day. One of these was a new feature called Content Linking which extends the existing Web Intelligence Input Controls that were introduced in XI R3.

Over the last few months I've been preparing for the SAP Business Objects 4.0 ramp-up and release, specifically looking into the Data Services and Information Steward sections of the new release.

For those of you who haven't come across these products before here's a quick summary.

Last week, Maxima launched SAP Business Objects 4.0 in Scotland at a well attended event programme. It was great to see clients old and new in attendance to hear from Maxima and SAP staff about the new features and business benefits they can expect to see in this latest release of the SAP Business Objects product suite. This log aims to capture the high level content for those who couldn't attend (or jog the memories of those who could!)

In previous posts I have reviewed the common ETL process of Change Data Capture (CDC) and shown how I have delivered this using SQL Server Integration Server 2005 (SSIS).  In this post I will outline how the same outcomes were achieved using SAP Business Objects Data Integrator (BODI) AKA SAP Data Services.

Light falls as an increasingly frustrated, young (ish) BI consultant starts wishing gruesome fates on multiple software companies and wondering aloud (though not in language that can be repeated here) why different software components can’t just ‘play nice’.  I had a deadline to deliver a last minute Xcelsius 2008 proof of concept by, did not have the software installed and when I did get the media found that it was demanding Office 2007 whilst I, up-to-date chap that I am, was running on Office 2010.  The solution was an unorthodox one.