I am wondering about the definition of end-users. Regarding reporting or BI, I find it difficult to define these. Taken literally the word ‘end-user’ seems too static and out of date to get around a real description.

However based on our extended experiences of more than 12 years of report building, BI implementations and end-user training I feel the following types are close to what we experience in day to day’s engagements.

1. Light users – The users who need static and reoccurring overviews. Real time information is not required and exploring data sets or ad hoc in-depth analyses neither. How? Static, free-of-charge pdf or html overviews. For managers and to support fixed and predefined arrangements on information sharing.
2. Dynamic users – Those who need real time refreshable information. For example they want a real time status of the performance of department during a specific period. How? Reports which could be refreshed and prompt you for the data set you would like to see. For example the report will prompt you for department, region, classification, period … before it refreshes. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads, business users …
3. Explorers – Users who need to explore, navigate and visualize data themselves (googling your data). There are certain questions to be answered which need low profile data mining. How? Use a BI tool which provides you exploring data sources, the capability to define your data set by pointing/clicking and easily sharing your results (by iPhone)? It should be powerful, simple, intuitive and fast. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads and your business for low profile data mining. But are you up for it? Mature enough yet to provide these access and responsibilities?
4. Power users - The users which need slicing and dicing data for specific answers. To empower route cause analysis when dashboards are telling you, you are under performing as a group or at your process. So not for answering questions on how we are doing it, but why this is happening. How? Use easy to use slice and dice functionalities together with application configuration knowledge to get there. By the way these are your colleagues which provide you also the above 3 information sources.

Do you agree?

Step in the future and enjoy it now at:

http://westbury-it.com/media/product-demos/part-1-introduction-to-report-building

http://www.sap.com/netherlands/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/large/business-intelligence/search-navigation/explorer/index.epx

Martijn

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

Fast forward a few months and another Gartner magic quadrant is out and again it’s looking at an area pretty close to Westbury: BI tools.

Our relationship with SAP Business Objects isn’t quite the same as our relationship with HP. After all, we’re an OEM reseller of Business Objects – it’s part and parcel of our Service Management Intelligence Suite product. But our solution is also somewhat platform independent when it comes to the BI tool – if you’re standardized on Cognos, for example, we can work with that, and SMI Suite is still very relevant.

So what’s the upshot from Gartner’s exercise in compare and contrast? Well, on their quadrant’s x-axis (“completeness of vision”), SAP Business Objects falls second only to IBM – quite an achievement in a field of fifteen big players. But on the y-axis (“ability to execute”) Gartner has it seventh – still good, but not as good. Overall this places Business Objects in the “leaders” quadrant.

On a more detailed level, Gartner says that “BusinessObjects’ reporting and ad hoc query capabilities continue to be cited as its top strength by its customers,” and that it provides “leading-edge capabilities, many [of] which complement its BI platform, in the areas of collaboration and decision support, text analytics, in-memory analytics, OnDemand BI (SaaS), search coupled with BI, data integration with lineage and impact analysis, and data quality.”

In the “cautions” column, however, Gartner warns that “customer support ratings for SAP are lower than for any other vendor in our customer survey”

Overall SAP comes out as one of the better, more established players, albeit with some areas to improve on.
Read the full report here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/oracle/article121/article121.html

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

http://www.businessobjectstips.com/tips/

There are a bunch of different tips useful for those navigating around Business Objects. There’s also a blog, which I’ll be adding to the list of other blogs we like.

Personally, whenever I’m confronted with a new technology and I’m trying to get my head around it, there is nothing more valuable than advice from someone else who has been in your position and had to try to figure stuff out. With the best will in the world, vendor user guides, by their very nature, are broad-ranging and general, whereas user generated content can – and generally does – focus on the issues that crop up commonly and deal with them in greater detail.
So the question remains: which of you is going to set up smisuitetips.com?

Tom

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you the SMI Suite TestDrive.

We’ve always struggled because SMI Suite is not an application that can be demoed like most desktop apps. Offering a trial version download is simply not a realistic option because the magic of SMI Suite is all in the implementation – it’s how it connects to your SM7 database, how the mapping to the reporting database works, how the universes interact with the reporting DB and so forth.

So when people ask to see a trial version we’ve only been able to offer a webinar session to show them how it works, when what they really want to do is get their hands dirty and have a play. Which is perfectly understandable, and precisely why we’ve worked so hard on getting TestDrive online.

So what is TestDrive and (perhaps more importantly) what isn’t it?

Well, TestDrive is a hosted implementation of SMI Suite, using a generic sample database, and accessible through Business Objects Infoview, which is a lightweight web client. We’ve opened up access to the Incident universe, so you can use the BO Web Intelligence web app to create your own report based on any of the Incident Management data, and save a pdf copy to your local machine.

For mainly technical reasons this is a massively scaled down version of what you get with the full version of SMI Suite. In the full version you get not one but five universes (Incident, plus Change, Configuration, Interaction and Problem) and you get the full range of BO XI front-end capabilities, which includes more functionality for creating, viewing, refreshing, scheduling and publishing of reports than we offer in the TestDrive. And, for reasons that I hope are obvious, the TestDrive will not return any data from your SM7 implementation in the way that the full version of SMI Suite does.

Despite these caveats, the SMI Suite TestDrive is a great way to check out how powerful reporting can be with SMI Suite and how easy it can be to pull key data from SM7 and get real insight into performance, workload, patterns and other interesting and useful stuff.

Well, I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but it turns out that someone calling himself BIguru (or is it Big Uru… not sure…) has been blogging about security within Business Objects. BIguru (or Maloy, as he seems to call himself in the real world) has written this piece, which combines a high-level, thematic view of the issues around BO security with specific examples of usage within the BO world. The actual application of security within Business Objects XI r3 is something of a black art which few can hope to understand, so it’s always useful to get a bit of insight from someone who, from the looks of things, is at the coal-face of BO every day.

The issue of security of operational data is, no doubt, going to become more important in the coming weeks, months and years as the world comes to terms with the effects of a financial crisis founded on non-regulation and non-transparency. I have a sneaking suspicion that corporate governance – already a burgeoning pseudo-industry in the noughties – is going to balloon into an obsession at the start of the new decade. Big players are going to bolt down every movable asset and bring in hordes of consultants to define security best practice in order to minimize financial risk wherever possible. And that means that even the weekly workgroup performance report is going to be audited for security soundness, so you need to make sure your understanding of BO security principles is up to snuff.

Here’s BIguru’s piece: http://biguru.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/developing-a-business-objects-security-model-bo-xi-3-1/

Tom

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that building a report is not that hard… and actually the definition of a report is the hardest part.  So to create a report – instead of just starting to build – you first need to think about a few important steps.

1. Determine what information you need and who needs it
2. Start building the report with selecting the data
3. Manipulate the data (add calculations or other parameters)
4. Create a final layout and broadcast it to your audience

The most important one of these is the first one, because based on the answer the following can be assessed. To determine which information you need you must think at several sub questions like:

• What is the exact goal of the report, is it a simple overview,  detailed overview with calculations, or an in-depth view of performance per, let’s say, assignment group;
• Number of Incidents per Assignment Group, Category and Priority
  
• Who needs the information (management, a customer or is it for someone with in depth knowledge);
• Management
• How do they expect to receive the report (report with refresh possibility, PDF, Excel or HTML)
• Report
• How often should the report be broadcast (once, every day, weekly)
• Every Monday morning at 8:00 am
  

Based on those answers you can start determining the source for you data, the answer on question 2. When you are using SMI Suite, and yeah you should,  the data will be available through several complete universes. Right now I’m taking the Incident process as an example so we need to select the Incident universe to get the data.

Once you’ve selected the objects you want to report on, that’s it… Business Objects will provide you with a default report with a tabular overview of the selected data.

Then the last part kicks in, time to create some calculations like averages, sums, counts or percentages, and maybe create some variables that represent data in a more “jip en janneke taal” [Ed: this Dutch idiom translates to "in layman's terms", but it's cute so I didn't want to edit it out entirely]. I will add an percentage of the total number per category and priority shown per Assignment group.

Finally create the final layout and it can look like this. Because it is for the management I have decided to give exceptional high percentages a red color and “in the danger” percentages an orange color. In this case they can see at a glance the status and the possible issues.

Finally you can set up a scheduler, part of Business Objects, and publish the report in the desired format.

If you don’t think a report over and start building without thinking you will see that a lot of work is lost in adjusting everything.  So keep this list to guide you through the process or if you have a better guide please share!

In the next blog I will CHANGE the subject! You’re a real Sherlock if you know the subject, so surprise me!

Richard