The session was well attended – not only in terms of numbers showing up, but also in the quality of discussion and input from the attendees.

The goal of the session was to identify challenges that people were having in reporting from ServiceCenter and Service Manager, and then to look at the solutions available, including Crystal Reports and – of course – SMI Suite.

David vH led the session, assisted ably by Richard and David dSA. We’d like to thank everyone who attended for their participation and input – and we hope the session was useful.

Tom

You will find the supported platforms lists and the support policy of the Westbury products. In the near future we will have a supported platform list for all third party software (For example HP Service Desk, HP Service Manager, HP Service Centre, Business Objects etc.) available. We hope you will benefit from this Westbury service!

Martin

At Metricnet the current metric of the month is First Call Resolution.

This metric is one of the metrics that’s in use at almost all of our customers and if your not measuring it yet, you should!

Check out http://www.metricnet.com/metric_month.html for their coverage of the metric.

Of course we ship a start up report around First Call Resolution with our SMI Suite product and we actually provide an easy to configure computed boolean as there are numerous variations in determining whether or not a ticket has been resolved at first call.

David vH

It wasn’t until a year after I started working at Westbury that I found out that the out-of-the-box reports could be customized. Now we’re referring to them as  start-up reports and that says it all. Hopefully it’s clear that the reports in our SMI Suite are a starting point for you to launch your own, customized initiatives.

Ilse

At our most recent upgrade the install started fine but while the installer was “Validating Install” we had time enough to get coffee, lunch, coffee, dinner, a good night sleep another coffee and so on..  a total no go.  After struggling with this I started to search the internet for similar stories.

I found some pretty interesting articles like: http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/XI3.1+SP2+Installation+on+Windows and http://neverknewthat.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/xi31sp2-slowinstall/. Both indicating that there is a silent install functionality.

Using the silent install the install was finished before my coffee was finished! However creating the .ini file can still be a pain because the cancel of the installation can take up a few minutes. Below a guideline:

(Assumption that the installer is already unzipped).
1. Create an empty response.ini file
Create a empty response.ini file on a location that’s easy to reach. You can use any name you like, but to keep it easy I used response. For this example I created it on the c:\ root.

2. Start the setup with the -w option
Open a command prompt and navigate to the install directory. Start the setup.exe with the -w option followed by the location of the response file.
E.g.: setup.exe -w c:\response.ini

3. Follow all the steps until the installation validation process starts.
Choose CANCEL here and abort the installation. The response.ini file will be updated with the options you selected during the setup.  (Please post your response.ini file below (without password), this way people reading this blog don’t need to do the -w part of the setup but can use your template)

4. Start the setup with the -r option
Open a command prompt and navigate to the install directory. Start the setup.exe with the -r option followed by the location of the response.ini file.
E.g.: setup.exe -r c:\response.ini

At this point the setup will start on the background, you don’t get any message if the setup is completed or executed successfully. Navigate to the Business Objects home directory (e.g. c:\program files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0) and open the Logging directory. There you find an install file that holds all the install information, one of the last lines will show either a success or failure.

As final check you can go to the Central Management Console and log in. Navigate to the Servers and select the CentralManagementServer. Go to Metrics and the product/resource version should show 12.2.*.

Hope it helps.. it sure did for me!

Richard

ITSM Uncovered (http://www.itsm-uncovered.com/) is a fancy-schmancy looking blog with some pretty interesting things to say. Recent entry titles include “Success or failure is determined in the middle of an organization, not at the top or bottom” and “The Organizational Evolution of Technology Management.”

Core ITSM (http://coreitsm.blogspot.com/) may look more like Kyra Sedgwick to ITSM Uncovered’s Keira Knightley, but is no less interesting for that. From the horse’s mouth: “Core ITSM is an approach to ITIL, COBIT,ISO 20000 Service Management and ISO 38500 that focuses on the key requirements of successful Business IT alignment.”

Vigilant Tips by Matt Hooper a.k.a. “Vigilant Guy” (http://getvigilant.blogspot.com/) is  nowhere near as menacing as it sounds. In fact, it’s all about ‘Tips that will help you take your IT organization to the next level of maturity. Best practices that will help you optimize the way you deliver your IT services.” Not a pool-ball-in-a-sock in sight. Phew!

Tom

and are adequately controlled to ensure valid, reliable, timely, and secure input, processing, and output at all levels of a system’s activity.

What’s in it for me?

• A controlled environment in which it’s clear which users and user groups use objects and reports.
• Root cause analysis to easily relate the disruption of a service to changes and users.
• Which reports are used and which reports are ‘dead’.
• It enables efficient license usage. Why pay for want you do not use?

The audit should answer the following questions:

1. Who is using your reporting solution?
2. Which groups use your reporting solution the most?
3. Which objects they are accessing?
4. Which reports are they using?
5. How many user licenses are we using at any given time?

You can audit the actions of individual users of Business Objects Enterprise as they log in and out of the system, access data, or create file-based events. You can also monitor system actions like the success or failure of scheduled objects. For each action, Business Objects Enterprise records the time of the action, the name and user group of the user who initiated the action, the server where it was performed, and a variety of other parameters available in the documentation with Business Objects.

The auditable actions I like the most are:

• Track when Objects are created, deleted of modified;
• Track when reports are opened, saved, refreshed, created, modified and deleted;
• Job monitoring and failure;
• Changes and history in login behaviour of users and groups;
• Monitoring of license usage.

A post last year on the Chennai Bi blog gives some useful guidelines on how to implement auditing: http://chennaibi.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/business-objects-auditing-in-xir3/

Martijn

Here’s how! The color definitions of the (first) palette are located in a file called ‘defaultConfig.xml’ located in one of the 16(!) folders that contain that file under the BusinessObjects home directory:

For the Web Intelligence Rich client this file is located under:
%BusinessObjectsHome%\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\classes\AppletConfig

For the http Web Intelligence client this file is located under:
%BusinessObjectsHome%\Tomcat55\webapps\AnalyticalReporting\webiApplet\AppletConfig

Search for the following string in the file and that’s were you will have to change things:
<!– Palette used by graph –>

Next task on my ToDo list is to come up with a good set of colors to use in the palette so if you have any suggestions let me know!

David

So it was with much interest that I read James Kobielus’ piece on Self-Service Business Intelligence: Dissolving the Barriers to Creative Decision-Support Solutions.

The whole piece is of interest, but the first paragraph struck a resounding note:

Self-service is all the rage in the world of business intelligence (BI), but it’s no fad. In fact, it’s the only way to make BI more pervasive, delivering insights into every decision—important or mundane—that drives your business. It’s the key to empowering users with actionable insights while removing many mundane BI development and maintenance tasks from IT’s crushing workload.

I think we probably need to hire James to sell SMI Suite for us, because what he’s talking about is exactly the same thing we’ve been banging on about for years: operational BI is not (or, at least, should not) be about the same dry reports run week in, week out. It should be about spotting a trend, or spike, or glitch in a particular report and then immediately running off to run a slightly different report that zeros in on that one particular detail. And then spotting a spike in that report and starting the whole process again. It should be about exploring the complexity of the data and about the data inspiring you to want to understand more about where it comes from and what it means. That’s the key to BI being a truly effective tool for saving money, working more efficiently, improving customer satisfaction and all the other things that we all strive to do every single day.

And as James so succinctly points out, self-service is at the heart of that concept.

Tom

Who wins is completely secondary to the energy put into the names for the awards. A few highlights include:

• The Trump Medal for Most Inappropriate Empire Building
• The Deng Xiao Peng Memorial Spittoon for Services to Democracy
• The Marie Antoinette Memorial Cake for Most Patronising Attitude

Head over to http://www.itskeptic.org/it-skeptic-awards-2009 for the full list.

Tom