InfoBurst Archive

Europe Trip 2010: Day 8 Denmark – Vikings and Excel Post-Processing

By
Paul
Published: April 19, 2010Posted in: Business Intelligence, Europe Trip 2010, InfoBurst, Infoburst 2009, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , ,
Europe Trip 2010: Day 8 Denmark – Vikings and Excel Post-Processing

I arrived late at night at Copenhagen airport and headed for the taxi rank to get to my hotel. As I exited the terminal, there was a large sign pointing to “Danish Taxis” to the right and “Swedish Taxis” to the left. Not understanding the difference, I figured I should opt for the Danish taxis since I was in Denmark.  As we drove to the hotel, I asked the driver about the Swedish taxis and he explained that they were cheaper but they take you to Sweden so I guess I made the right choice!

I checked in at the Kong Arthur Hotel (Kong being King in Danish) and made it to my room where this huge modern painting hung above my bed. I have included a picture since it will have different interpretations to each viewer.  At that time it was saying to me “No matter how tied up in knots you are, come to bed”. In the morning, I noticed there was both the outline of a man and a woman in the picture and I had a totally different interpretation.

Although I did not see a lot of Denmark in one day, I did get to meet quite a few Danish people in my meetings and learned that Denmark is the home of Lego, Lager beer, ham and Vikings. I also noticed that the average Dane is significantly taller than the average European – must be that special beer and ham! 

I was visiting one of the largest companies in Denmark where a couple of the divisions use BusinessObjects for their Business Intelligence. They were interested in finding a better way to schedule, publish and distribute their reports so I showed them a demonstration of the new InfoBurst 2009 along with presenting a few customer case studies. They were particularly excited about the ability of InfoBurst to apply Excel macro post processing. It seems they, like many other companies, have large numbers of Excel users that want all their Business Intelligence reports delivered in Excel format but publishing reports directly from BusinessObjects to Excel does not provide all the features in the Excel output that they want delivered to the user. For example, one customer wanted to make use of data grouping and outlining within Excel for one-click collapse and expansion of individual data groupings in the report. In addition, they wanted each and every data group and outline to be automatically collapsed in the initial delivery of the report – keeping the report compact and easier to view. This simply cannot be done publishing from BusinessObjects to Excel but with InfoBurst 2009, you can execute a VBA macro following report production and produce a revised version of the report for publishing.

This caused great excitement amongst my Danish audience and there were smiles and vigorous hand shaking at the end of the meeting.  I think they really appreciated the logical building block of adding the Excel post-processing – just like Lego!

Europe Trip 2010: Day 3 Paris – Fine Cuisine Fails to Sustain the Body Whole

By
Paul
Published: April 12, 2010Posted in: Europe Trip 2010, Infoburst 2009, Paul Blogs on BI, ProductsTags:
Europe Trip 2010: Day 3 Paris – Fine Cuisine Fails to Sustain the Body Whole

A second day in Paris and another day full of meetings. The second meeting is over lunch at a classic French restaurant situated next to the famous Opera with elaborately painted ceilings and a platoon of waiting staff for every table.  Each of the menu choices requires a paragraph of description and I end up selecting a poached egg, smoked salmon and caviar dish as the appetizer and a very exotic and grand sounding scallop and pasta entrée. There is great fanfare as the food arrives and large plates are placed in front of each of us but my smile of anticipation subsides as the actual food on the dish in front of me requires a magnifying glass to see it! I am not sure what kind of egg it was but it did not come from a chicken.  Judging by its size, I would hazard to guess it was more like a hummingbird! This was wrapped in the tiniest of slivers of smoked salmon and maybe four specs of caviar. Three dainty bites and it was gone.

I was hopeful (and hungry) for the main course – at least there would be pasta. The plate itself was larger than the one for the appetizer but this was a deception since there was a small indentation in the middle of the plate that actually housed the entirety of my meal. It was honestly the size of a golf ball consisting of two small scallops and something that was more like couscous than pasta!  It tasted great but it did not satisfy my hunger.

Needless to say there was plenty of time for conversation since the eating took just seconds! The discussion with a French customer in the insurance business centered on expectations of the results of a proof-of-concept. The customer was looking at a large project to migrate their main application to an open system environment. While they felt that the proof-of-concept fully demonstrated that the application itself could be migrated successfully, they wanted to see how the operational environment would be handled also.

When migrating software, we often overlook the environment on which it runs. Of course, if the environment does not change, it is understandable that it is not always considered. However, many businesses today change their hardware and operational environments more frequently than they change their software. With constant new features in hardware and underlying operating systems, as well as new ways to schedule and distribute information, there is plenty to take into consideration.

It turned out that this customer was most concerned about the printing of insurance cards since this has the biggest impact on their business. By migrating their application to new hardware and operating system, they would be changing their whole mechanism of scheduling, distributing and printing.

To me, this is not an unusual situation. In the world of Business Intelligence, I see it all the time since scheduling and distribution of reports is equally , if not more, important than ad-hoc query and analysis to many businesses. It is about delivering the right information in the right format to the right people at the right time.

It was quite appropriate that my next meeting with a partner was all about Business Intelligence report and dashboard scheduling, bursting and publishing. They have many clients throughout Europe with many needs to deliver pertinent information in Xcelsius dashboards and Microsoft Reporting Services Reports. I showed and explained how with InfoBurst 2009 you can now deliver bursted Xcelsius dashboards as standalone SWF files so each recipient sees the same dashboard but only with data relevant to them in it. In addition, InfoBurst 2009 supports the scheduling, bursting and publishing of Microsoft Reports .

After my last meeting, I was completely drained with my energy reserves running on life support. I suppose my lesson for the day was that it is important to meet all the needs of a customer’s application environment. Migrating the applications without taking care of the operational environment is like eating fine French cuisine without satisfying your body’s energy needs.

I ate a big meal tonight!

Europe trip 2010: Day 2 Paris – Business A La Carte

By
Paul
Published: April 11, 2010Posted in: Business Intelligence, Europe Trip 2010, Infoburst 2009, Paul Blogs on BITags: ,

I arrive in Paris in the middle of a train strike and I am expecting the worst but as I step off the Eurostar train from London (not on strike – different company) and jump on the Metro (not on strike – different company), I notice nothing unusual.  I was told by a close friend who lives in France that strikes have become a way of life there since they are so numerous and people have learned to adapt. In fact, I end up arriving at my appointment early and so I have time to go to lunch with the people I am meeting at SAP.

Eating in France is not so much a necessity as it is a religion. It is not to be rushed and the social aspect is as important as the eating itself. Needless to say, the discussion over lunch was really interesting and stimulating as we exchanged ideas on the future of various Business Intelligence solutions.

During the meeting and demonstrations after lunch, I was able to see the SAP Explorer solution running on an iPhone which I know the Londoner’s will love (see my BLOG from Day 1).  I was also able to share the latest features of InfoBurst 2009 with the people from SAP.

At my next meeting that day with another partner, I started with the demonstrations and update on InfoBurst 2009. This was quite interesting since one of the people in the room did not speak English but he seemed to catch on due to the visual and intuitive nature of the solution.  It also helped that I was very animated when I presented and when he looked really bemused, I threw in a sentence in French. This always seemed to make him laugh and I was not sure if this was because my poor French or due to my “Inspector Clouseau” accent. 

After this meeting I went to dinner with the partner and, again, had a great conversation about strategy which was so much easier over a meal than in a board room.

My “take away” for the day was that the best way to do business in France is while eating and that if ever the restaurants went on strike in France, it would bring business to a standstill!

Comparing Xcelsius Connectivity Choices

By
Roxanne
Published: February 5, 2010Posted in: Business Intelligence, InfoBurst, InfoBurst-XDS, Xcelsius, XDMTags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Comparing Xcelsius Connectivity Choices

As more people deploy Xcelsius dashboard solutions, Xcelsius connectivity options has become a hot topic and I am often asked to compare the most popular methods used by BusinessObjects customers which are Query as a Web Service (QaaWS), Live Office and InfoBurst-XDS (or XDM for non-BOE deployments).

This is a brief summary of the differences between these 3 options which may be helpful.

QaaWS is a BusinessObjects web service that access BusinessObjects universes (and only universes) to pull back data.  Each time a dashboard is opened and selections are made, a real-time query is launched against production data, which, depending on the amount of data requested, can take many long seconds or minutes.  I have not found it to be very effective, and the few companies that do use it, have highly summarized tables in their data warehouse to use for this purpose (i.e. lots of preparation work).  The only upside I see to this method is that security is already in place based on BO user ids, and, real-time data retrieval (if that is the requirement). Large amounts of data (i.e., more than 500 rows of data) returned by the web service will significantly slow down the performance of the dashboard.

With Live Office you can access Web Intelligence or Crystal reports as your data source and use the functionality of these reporting tools to summarize, crosstab and format your data.  The advantage is that you can schedule these reports to refresh in BO (InfoView) and then use the latest instance of that report for your Xcelsius data source, without waiting for it to refresh.  The disadvantage is that it requires users to log into BusinessObjects every time they access the dashboard.  (Supposedly you can use single-sign-on with this, but I have not seen it working anywhere).  Obviously, if you want to deploy this solution outside of BusinessObjects, like hosting the SWF file on SharePoint or an Intranet, most companies do not like having to sign on again.  Also, it would not work if you want to deploy outside the network (outside a firewall).  There have been many posts on the forums about the “flakiness” of LiveOffice, often losing connections and unable to refresh reports.  Since Live Office has to hold the data in the Xcelsius spreadsheet, the amount of data returned will have a negative impact on dashboard performance.  This last item has been the biggest barrier to our customers, who often wish to show granular data in their dashboards, or a significant amount of historical data.

InfoBurst XDS and XDM were designed to overcome these obstacles.  XDS can use Web Intelligence or Desktop Intelligence reports as data sources for pulling data, which it can refresh overnight (based on a schedule) and convert this data to xml.  XML is the fastest way to load data into Xcelsius.  XDS does not require a BusinessObjects login.  XDS also has the option of accessing a database directly (any database that can be accessed via an ODBC connection) through SQL queries, which can also be scheduled and converted to XML.  XDS also provides options for distributing the dashboard (putting on a network share, an intranet site, or as an email attachment or embedded in an in-line html email).  The biggest advantage, though, is the Intelligent Cache feature which allows dashboard developers to “cache” a very large set of data (I am currently working on a data set of over 18,000 rows of data), and then pass parameters through the xml code, based on selections the user makes on the dashboard, which then returns the small data set needed for that particular chart.  (On the above example I am passing parameters, based on drop-down menus, for Division, Plant, Department, Day and Shift, which returns the 6 rows of data I need to display – shift hours per day per Department.)  Since the dashboard is only loading these 6 rows of data, obviously the performance is very fast.    We recently converted a QaaWS dashboard where the data loading time when changing customers went from 2 minutes or so to less than 10 seconds, using Intelligent Cache filtering.

Rock Star

By
Paul
Published: August 25, 2008Posted in: Business Intelligence, InfoBurst-XDS, Paul Blogs on BI, XcelsiusTags: ,

A few months ago, my two youngest kids received this Rock Band game for Xbox 360 from their aunt. It came with a drum kit, guitar and microphone and basically lets you play and sing along to famous songs by famous rock bands. It also allows you to create your own rock star characters which you can see prancing around the stage to a wild crowd of fans while you are belting out David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” or laying down some mean riffs from Deep Purple’s “Highway Star.” 

Of course, both my kids are really good at it, but their greatest enjoyment is getting their Dad to participate. They literally roll on the floor in hysterical laughter as I sing (sorry, attempt to sing) “I think I’m Paranoid” by Garbage. When my mother-in-law visited a few weeks back, they insisted I sang “Black Hole Sun” while they accompanied me on guitar and drums.  Apparently, she still cannot tell anyone about it without tears of laughter running down her face!

I think many of us have dreamed of being a Rock Star at some point in our lives and, if not a Rock Star, then some other type of Superstar. Unfortunately, only a few people ever “make it,” and the rest of us are left to dream and play Rock Band. However, I believe that desire to be a Superstar lies just under the surface in most of us, and we are always looking for an opportunity to shine and be famous even in our day-to-day “non Rock Star” jobs. I saw some of these unexpected Superstars at the recent IBIS 2008 conference in Lake Las Vegas receiving awards (very similar to the Grammy Awards!) for their amazing integrated Business Intelligence Dashboard solutions. Banner Health Systems won the Most Valuable Dashboard award for a sensational solution that allows monitoring of Glucose levels in patients and is being rolled out to over 4,000 health care professionals at multiple hospital locations. What makes this solution, and the team that created it, so incredible is the ingenious integration of multiple Business Intelligence technologies and tools to provide an application that will literally help to save people’s lives.

The intricate work using the BusinessObjects Data Integrator ETL tool to extract, transform and load all the necessary patient and clinical data into the Data Mart every 24 hours was a milestone accomplishment. Then there is the Xcelsius dashboard that allows clinicians to intuitively and interactively check the overall Glucose initiative compliance ratings at different facilities.  This, then, can trigger Web Intelligence drill down reports to look at the values by individual nursing unit, and even individual patient, and then monitor the trend in that patient over 24, 48 and 72 hours. But the coolest piece of all is the InfoBurst-XDS report and dashboard management tool that automatically refreshes the Xcelsius dashboard from a Web Intelligence report and creates data ranges in cache that allow this application to be used by thousands of people with excellent response times. So “hats off” to this remarkable team of people at Banner who are definitely Superstars in my book. All I can say is “You rock!”

Newer Entries »