In this, the final post in my series looking at how the new SAP Information Design Tool (IDT) can support the delivery of Agile Analytics, I'm going to be reviewing the capacity of the IDT to cope with adaptive design processes. As in the previous two posts – covering Collaborative Working and Testing – I'm taking my lead on Agile Analytics from Ken Collier's excellent, recent book on the topic. In "Agile Analytics", Collier devotes the first of his chapters on Technical Delivery Methods to the concepts behind evolving, excellent design. It's a superb guide through the benefits, challenges, approaches and practical design examples to delivery through an adaptive design process and I'm not going to attempt to capture it all here. In a nutshell, though, Collier argues that "Agility benefits from adaptive design" and stresses that this is not a replacement methodology for your existing DW/BI design techniques but rather a state of mind approach which uses those techniques to deliver more value, faster.

This post continues the series looking at how the new SAP Information Design Tool (IDT) can support the agile delivery of SAP BI projects. In the previous entry I looked at how collaborative working and a degree of version control could be delivered using the IDT in line with the concepts laid out by Ken Collier in his recent, excellent, book "Agile Analytics". In this entry I turn to how IDT can support the testing methodology that Collier explains in the seventh chapter of his book. As is the situation with version control, the IDT is far from being a complete solution but it is an advance on what is available on what is available in the traditional Universe Designer. Fundamentally, I'm going to be making using of the IDT Business Layer Queries. These Queries are mentioned, briefly, in the IDT documentation but it's not really clear what they're intended to be used for so hope no SAP developers mind me co-opting them in the name of testing!

In my previous blog post introducing this series of posts, I discussed both the concept of Agile Analytics (with particular reference to the recent, excellent book by Ken Collier, Agile Analytics) and how the new SAP Information Design Tool (IDT) could go some way (but, by no means, all) to support it. This blog explores a specific area of detail here, namely how the IDT facilitates a degree of collaborative development and version control in SAP Universe development. It's far from being a complete version control solution – lots of room for improvement – but it's certainly an advance on what is possible in the old Universe Designer traditionally used by SAP developers and does allow developers to work together on aspects of the single Universe artefact.

Last year there wasn't a Business Intelligence event I attended that didn't cover the topic of Agile BI in one sense or another. It was always a fascinating source of discussion that quite often raised considerable passion. To me, it seemed a common sense approach and one that, to varying degrees, the BI projects that Maxima have been delivering over the years have pretty much been in line with.

At the start of this year, I was browsing various BI discussion boards and came across a recommendation for a new book title "Agile Analytics : A Value Driven Approach to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing" written by Ken Collier. There are many wonderful things about 21st Century living but one is surely the fact that, minutes after reading these recommendations, I'd downloaded the book onto my Kindle and was fully engrossed in what Collier had to say. I'm happy to report that the recommendations were well made and I've been adding my own to clients ever since finishing it (the first time round – it's one of those books you can't help going back to). What I thought I'd do here is tie in some of the concepts that Collier raises in his excellent book to some of the features in the new SAP Information Design Tool.

In my previous blog I showed how shortcut joins can prove useful when trying to minimise users being prompted for unnecessary contexts. For the example discussed, the data would not change if I selected objects from the Dimension table and did not include any measures from the Fact tables. There were a number of potential shortcut joins that could be used to reduce the number of tables used in a query without affecting the results (and preventing the user from being prompted for a context).

After designing and reviewing several Universes over the last few years one question that often comes up is how do you stop users getting prompted for contexts? Often I bite my tongue and reserve judgement until I have seen the Universe as more often than not the Context use is entirely relevant. Often the Universe shown presents the user with a context and each one can provide different answers and as such represent an area where a context is entirely relevant to use. Often the change required is to use a measure to resolve the context and/or providing clear context names and descriptions to ensure the user would know what context to select.

It's time for another Maxima SAP Scotland Update. We held a couple of these events last year and they proved remarkably well attended (even with one of our seasonal winter 'hurricanes' blowing Central Scotland away!) so we're keen to make sure that everybody who attended those (and new names) will always learn something new each time we do them. This time round we've changed venue (it's the Whisky Experience up by Edinburgh Castle) and, more importantly, will be actually stepping into topics that cover project delivery with the SAP BusinessObjects product suite.

After finishing at my latest client site I have been doing the usual refreshers on what's new in the big, bad world of Business Intelligence and, in particular, SAP BusinessObjects 4.0. When reviewing the 4.0 platform search functionality it became apparent that the default setup of this tool can greatly impact performance (particularly where the content increases).

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.

Way back at the start of Autumn 2011, I wrote two blogs covering the install of a standalone SAP Data Services 4.0 environment. The first blog covered the deployment of the standalone Information Platform Services (IPS) required to manage authentication and security of the Data Services environment whilst the second looked at installing Data Services 4.0 itself. Keen readers of those two blogs will have noticed that each made reference to a forthcoming third entry which would look at integrating that Data Services environment with an existing SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 environment. It's taken me a while but here it is!

A quick post to let you know about a couple of upcoming events where I'll be speaking on BI related subjects. I've been busy with the day job for the past few months so have rather missed the public speaking opportunity and the associated socialising they bring. As with those in the early summer however, these events do all seem to come at once so I hope I can avoid any voice-robbing winter viruses beforehand.

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.

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.

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.