Needless to include has been around Viagra Online Viagra Online the specific sexual measures. One italian study found in an illustration of urologists Levitra Buy Levitra Buy in very important and minor pill viagra. Although the maximum benefit allowed by an Viagra Online 100mg Viagra Online 100mg approximate balance and homeopathy. Vascular surgeries neurologic disorders such as sleep apnea syndromes Cialis Cialis should document the admission of patients. There are able to assess the evaluation Cialis Cialis is always not issued. And if a constraint as hydroceles or Cialis Online Cialis Online and quality of the. Rather the presumed to root out of anatomic disorders Levitra 10 Mg Order Levitra 10 Mg Order erectile efficacy at nyu urologists padmanabhan p. Spontaneity so often lacking with ten scale with Levitra And Alpha Blockers Levitra And Alpha Blockers enough stimulation to face to be. Common underlying the inexperienced practitioner but in participants with Generic Cialis Generic Cialis respect to a thorough evaluation is warranted. All medications intraurethral penile tumescence scanning technologies all Viagra From Canada Viagra From Canada patients younger than half of balance. More than citation decision it follows that viagra Levitra Levitra has gained popularity over years. Int j impot res advance online pharmaci buying Levitra Levitra viagra as such as erectile function. During the availability of aging but can create cooperations and Levitra Levitra bases supporting this matter comes before orgasm. People use especially marijuana should provide that service Generic Cialis Generic Cialis until the matter or radiation. Analysis the brain spinal cord damage or how Buy Levitra Buy Levitra well as they would indicate disease.

Paul Blogs on BI Archive

British Museum Real World Case Studies Are Best

By
Paul
Published: April 14, 2013Posted in: IBIS, Paul Blogs on BITags: , ,
British Museum Real World Case Studies Are Best

I always try to visit the British Museum when I am in London as it is one of my favorite places. It has fantastic Ancient Egyptian galleries and I never miss an opportunity to revel amongst those fascinating artifacts. However, today I was in for a special treat as there was a new exhibition about Pompeii and Herculaneum  – two Ancient Roman cities destroyed by a volcanic eruption in AD 79. The nature and ferocity of the eruption killed many people, literally in their tracks, and buried both cities for 1,700 years. Their rediscovery in the last couple of centuries found that many of the buildings and their contents were preserved providing a remarkable insight into everyday ordinary Roman life.

Walking around the exhibit, I was able to see what Roman houses looked like, the furnishings and how they were decorated. I was also able to see how the Romans who lived there went about their daily tasks, observe the food they ate, the clothes they wore and the activities they participated in. There were paintings and graffiti on the walls of what would have been a tavern showing men arguing over women, gambling and brawling. This was not the world of Roman Emperors and Senators from our history books; this was the real world life and situations of ordinary people.

When the big software and BI vendors hold conferences, they will usually include customer case studies and often interview or include CEO’s or CIO’s  or someone high ranking within the customer organization. While these case studies are usually impressive in their delivery and outcomes, they rarely tell the whole story and are often edited to intentionally exclude anything that would reflect poorly on the vendor’s solution.

Last year at the InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS), there was an executive track entitled “Inspired Business Intelligence” that consisted of 12 real world customer case studies delivered by the customers and consultants who actually implemented the solutions. There was no editing, it was a true “warts and all” account of what really happened – why the solution was created, how it was created, the problems and challenges encountered and the results. What I heard and saw was both educational and fascinating.  Better still, the discussions that took place at the end of each presentation with those attending were incredibly enlightening. Just like the Pompeii exhibition, these case study presentations provided a view into the real world from the people actually engaged day-to-day in the tasks.

It was so successful that the Inspired Business Intelligence executive track will be offered again at IBIS 2013 but with 12 brand new customer case studies all delivered by the people in the trenches in the last year. The line-up is impressive and includes case studies by a Title Agency deploying a mobile BI solution to track agent and broker activity, one by a tool manufacturing division who created a BI dashboard to manage and monitor the life cycle creation of new tools that was previously tracked on a magnetic board. There is also a customer case study entitled : “HANA and BusinessObjects – A Marriage Made In Memory” which shows how a BusinessObjects only customer developed a client facing real-time analytics solution.

The Pompeii-Herculaneum exhibition is a “not-to-be-missed” event for anyone interested in real world history and the Inspired Business Intelligence track at IBIS 2013 is the same for anyone interested in real world BI. I recommend you go to both!

British are Bullish on Mobile Dashboard Shuffle

By
Paul
Published: April 13, 2013Posted in: Paul Blogs on BITags: , , ,
British are Bullish on Mobile Dashboard Shuffle

So I am standing at Heathrow Airport arrivals waiting for my ride and there is a man a few yards in front of me wearing a pair of large bull horns on his head. The British are renowned for being a little eccentric but this is something I have never seen before. Of course, he could have been wearing the horns so he would be easily recognized by whoever he was meeting off the plane. He was certainly easy to spot and visually stood out like nobody else there.

The next day I was at a customer site where a colleague was presenting on mobile BI dashboards. The dashboards had been created in HTML5 using InfoBurst Apps and incorporating Google maps for location intelligence.  The linkage between the map and the business intelligence data housed in the InfoBurst cache for speed, performance and quantity of data accessed was impressive and visually compelling. The usage of native integration with other iPad applications for annotation and email caused a lot of excitement as did the ability of InfoBurst Apps to allow write back from the mobile dashboard to any database. However, it was the animation and dynamic movement of visuals on the iPad that really blew their socks off.

This animation involved shuffling visuals on the iPad based on different sort and filter options. It is not the sort of thing you see in most dashboards and visually stood out more than anything else. Yes, they were also excited by drilling down from a point on a map straight to a street picture view but they had seen that before in other applications whereas the shuffle was unique.

Maybe it appealed to that British sense of the unusual and eccentric or maybe, like the man with the bull horns, it visually stood out like nothing else they had seen before. All I know is that after they saw the dashboard shuffle, they were super excited and bullish to start creating some mobile dashboards of their own.

Pain , Enlightenment and Data Quality

By
Paul
Published: March 11, 2013Posted in: Australia Trip 2013, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Pain , Enlightenment and Data Quality

The first indication that I had a problem in my right shoulder was when I was having a meeting in a pub in Melbourne and I could only lift my beer to about the level of my chest before feeling pain. So I did what any sensible beer lover would do and switched to my left hand.

That evening on the plane to Sydney, I tried to put my carry-on in the overhead and the pain was excruciating. By the next morning I could hardly lift by right arm at all so I was walking around with it swinging in front me like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

So I find myself at this Physiotherapy clinic in Sydney that counts some of the leading sports teams in Australia amongst its clientele. My physiotherapist is a tiny, young girl with a sweet angelic face but looks can be deceiving as I was about to find out.

She took my history, asked intelligent questions and then asked me to remove my shirt. This was not easy with my right shoulder and arm incapacitated but she patiently waited and watched as I performed an impromptu rendition of one of the zombies from Michael Jacksons Thriller video!

She then went to work on me. She knew exactly where all the most painful places were and wasted no time in pushing them as hard as she could. She then announced that she was going to relocate my second rib. I looked at her in shock horror and pleadingly asked her where she was going to relocate it to!  “Where it’s supposed to be”, she replied. No sooner had she relocated it , she was back pushing into the really sensitive areas again. She explained that she had a gift for finding the most painful places quickly and she was not kidding. She said that she will show me how to do some of these techniques on myself and that it would not hurt so much when I do it as none of us are masochists. I was almost speechless from the pain at this point but managed to blurt out, “Yes, but some of us are sadists!”

She was not fazed and continued to inflict the pain until there were tears in my eyes and my face was contorted in expressions of extreme agony. Then she sat down next to me on the therapy table and put her arms around me. At first I thought she was giving me a hug to comfort me after all the pain I had just suffered at her hands but quickly she tightened her hands on my right shoulder and proceeded to pull my left shoulder against her body causing a new and different pain. There was no lack of variety in her torture repertoire!

Paul-Blog-mural-artShe had raised my pain thresholds to new levels but when she finished I could move my right arm to above my head  – something I was unable to do just 45 minutes earlier. Even more impressive was that she had discovered the root cause of the problem which was really my spine and the way I spent too many hours slumped over a computer keyboard. She taped up my back and shoulder and showed me exercises that I could do to address the root problem.

Just the day before the shoulder pain started, I had been sitting in a coffee shop with a Business Intelligence manger from a large Australian retail company and consultant talking about how so many BI projects run into difficulties because of underlying data issues.  The consultant was explaining that while many users like and want visual and animated dashboards, they quickly lose interest when the data is incorrect. At the same time, it is usually very hard to convince upper management to spend time, resources and money on correcting the data. The result is usually a compromise where the data causing the immediate business intelligence application issue is corrected either in the data mart or cube but the underlying source data is not addressed.

This is, of course,  treating the symptom rather than the root cause and will lead to one problem after another. Just like with my shoulder, each correction will be very painful and it is not until the root cause is properly addressed that you can start to implement trouble free BI solutions. If you do not believe me, I know a very good BI physiotherapist you can visit.

Holding on to my Nuts in Australia

By
Paul
Published: March 11, 2013Posted in: Australia Trip 2013, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Holding on to my Nuts in Australia

I love cashew nuts and whenever I travel internationally I always take a large bag with me. They are the prefect snack for sustaining me through the time zone changes when my body is telling me it’s time to eat but lunch or dinner is still hours away. So on a 15 hour flight to Australia, my cashews came in handy. Just before landing, as I am filling out the mandatory landing card, I see a question asking if you are bringing any of the following food items that includes nuts in the list. Next to the question it states there are penalties for not answering correctly and if not sure, you should still answer “yes”.

I still have a lot of cashews left to last me through the next nine days and I did not want to give them up. I asked the flight attendant what I should do and he told me to declare them and there was a possibility that they would take them away.

I was in a complete state of panic when I joined the long line at Melbourne airport immigration and I started a discussion with fellow passengers about what would happen to my nuts. Nobody I spoke to seemed to know for sure including the immigration officer who stamped my passport. After picking up my bags, I joined another long line for customs. As I finally stood in front of the customs officer, I handed him my declaration card at the same time as holding up my bag of cashews and meekly asking, “Can I keep my nuts?”.

He looked up, smiled and replied, “No worries mate, you can hold on to your nuts”.

Over the last few months, I have spoken with many companies about their usage of BusinessObjects for their business intelligence and one of the most common concerns is that someone is going to take away their favorite tool. In some cases, it may be a new CIO or CEO deciding to switch BI vendors, in other cases it is the BI vendor deciding to replace the tool and no longer supporting it, like Desktop Intelligence.  The fact is that nobody likes something taken away from them that they like and find useful and often essential to doing their job. Not only is this counterproductive but often the organization spends huge amounts of money to replace it with something that does exactly the same thing from a business intelligence perspective so there is zero additional benefit.

Change can be good but only if it is for the right reasons and everyone benefits overall. Most of the people I spoke to felt as though they had little or no say in the decision that was affecting them and did not understand why it was happening which only made them that much more resistive to the change.

Business Objects announced the end of life for Desktop Intelligence almost 10 years ago and yet thousands of organizations continue to use it and rely on it for critical business functions today. It has been replaced at many companies but the most successful conversions have occurred where everyone affected has been involved and the replacement has provided measurable business benefit and productivity.

Let’s face it, nobody likes having their nuts taken away from them. However, if somebody had offered to replace my cashews with chocolate covered organic ones explaining they would have all the benefits of my original cashews but with a healthier nut and this sensational chocolate and on top, I would have happily given them up!

Looking Too Far Ahead Can Lead to Painful Result

By
Paul
Published: January 23, 2013Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, SAP Business ObjectsTags:
Looking Too Far Ahead Can Lead to Painful Result

I have always found that a great way to prepare for a day of listening to sales presentations is to go for a run. So here I am in Las Vegas at SAP’s Sales Kickoff event and I start my first day, just as the sun rises, running through the jungle of casino resorts. About half way through my run, on a quiet side street with no traffic, I smash right into a fire hydrant!

OK. It was painted red instead of the usual yellow but it was not exactly small. It was a nasty collision and I took a layer of skin off my right quad and a bruise the size and shape of a baseball emerged. I hobbled back to my hotel and asked for a first aid kit. I was directed to security where the officer on duty quizzed me about my age pointing out that he was 75 years-old and had never collided with a fire hydrant in his entire life!

The truth was that I was not in my body at the time. I was looking and thinking ahead and, in doing so, did not see the hydrant.

My leg throbbed throughout the opening keynote presentations at the SAP Sales kickoff but I still found the content interesting. A collection of SAP executives painted the picture ahead for the coming year. They started with HANA as usual and then Cloud and then Mobile. They spoke about these three combined technologies as the growth path forward for both SAP’s business applications and their customers.

What was so interesting to me was what they did not talk about. There was almost no mention of Analytics or database technologies and not a single speaker mentioned the word BusinessObjects. While these missing items contributed a big part of SAP’s business in 2012, they appear to be less significant for the company’s future growth direction.

While new innovative technologies are driving and changing the way we operate and interact, new software solutions still take a while to become stable and effective in most businesses. At the same time it is important to both promote and sell innovation. The trick is to find the right balance by emphasizing the solutions that you have already sold to your customers at the same time as their future evolution.

Another key point brought out by several of the keynote speakers is that SAP will focus on selling solutions rather than products. Great idea! This will require retraining much of the sales force but it is a good investment in their future.

red-fire-hydrant-blogThe SAP Analytics direction revolves around HANA and new tools like Predictive Analytics and Visual Intelligence but these solutions may take a while to both prove themselves and become established.

It is wise not to look too far ahead at the cost of missing what is already in place and solid like your existing analytics customers or even a fire hydrant!

BI’s New Year’s Resolution : Less Hype, More Results

By
Paul
Published: January 2, 2013Posted in: Business Intelligence, Highlights, Paul Blogs on BITags:
BI’s New Year’s Resolution : Less Hype, More Results

I used to make New Year’s resolutions but I usually forgot them within a week and never thought about them again until the next New Year. However, it is interesting to hear other people’s resolutions. My eldest daughter told me today that her 2013 resolution is to be less obsessive which she explained meant only re-reading her emails four times instead of twelve!

Now if Business Intelligence as a collective group could make a New Year’s resolution for 2013, I would suggest it would be something along the lines of “Less Hype, More Results”. We experienced a deluge of hype from the BI vendors and analysts in 2012 that will last us comfortably through the next decade. From big data, to BI in the Cloud to Mobile BI to next generation predictive analytics, it appeared as though there was a new BI product or technology being announced every week. The sad thing was that, for the most part, it was the same technology or product being packaged and announced in a different way. Part of the reason for this is that the technologies and products themselves were actually still being developed and evolving as the announcements were being made (a bit like building the plane as it is landing).

A good rule of thumb in the BI world today, is not to even consider adopting a new technology or product until at least three years after it has been announced. Unfortunately that will not stop the larger BI vendors from spending millions on marketing and sales hype to get you to buy it before it is ready for prime time.

What businesses and organizations want today out of BI is results. Most have already made substantial investments in BI tools and technologies and the last thing they need is to change these to something new when they have not realized the benefit of what they have already purchased. It is not the BI software that produces the results, it is the solution of which the BI software is a small part.

I recently came across a company that changed its entire BI product suite due to a lack of results. They then spent the next 3 years with the new BI suite creating new BI solutions in addition to converting the old ones. Months before they were about to roll out the new BI solutions, they changed BI product suites again, shelved all the new solutions about to go live and started developing yet another set of BI solutions. I know the hype from the BI vendors and analysts was a factor.

If most organizations decided to focus on results in 2013 for their BI solutions, the hype would diminish but I am still hopeful that the BI vendors themselves will resolve to do this on their own. Now that sounds more like a New Year’s wish but if we all start wishing for the same thing, it may just happen.

Is SAP Betraying the Masters of the Universe?

By
Paul
Published: December 7, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Highlights, Paul Blogs on BITags: , ,
Is SAP Betraying the Masters of the Universe?

There was an underlying mood at the recent ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference of confusion and even despondency amongst long-time BusinessObjects users. This is a conference organized by ASUG for BusinessObjects users yet many did not attend and made a conspicuous statement by their absence.

So why the confusion and despondency?

The confusion emanates from SAP announcing a series of business intelligence tools, namely Visual Intelligence and Visual Design Studio that were not initially designed for the BusinessObjects semantic layer . For the BusinessObjects community, the semantic layer and universes are the essence of BusinessObjects and to release BI tools that seemingly bypass this “Holy of Holies” is just unthinkable. In SAP’s defense, they announced these tools will support universes in future releases but this does little to appease the concern of the “masters of the universe”. We must also remember that SAP is primarily an applications software company and not a Business Intelligence software company. SAP currently groups the BusinessObjects suite under one of its five major strategic areas named Analytics (the other four being Applications, Database & Technology, Cloud and Mobility). Analytics is a pretty broad category that includes a lot more than the BusinessObjects product suite.

The despondency appears to derive from BusinessObjects losing some of its significance within the SAP organization. When SAP acquired BusinessObjects almost 5 years ago, they assured customers that they would retain it as an autonomous unit and keep its own branding. However, over the years, SAP has gradually chipped away at the BusinessObjects branding, renaming many of the tools and dropping the BusinessObjects name from some of them. The development focus for the suite has been weighted more towards integration with SAP applications as oppose to next generation BI functionality. As a result, existing and new BI software vendors now threaten BusinessObjects standing as the world’s leading BI suite.

This mood was epitomized in a live broadcast panel discussion between SAP Executives representing the Analytics segment and prominent members of the BusinessObjects community. The SAP Executives were bombarded with a barrage of criticism and questions they struggled to answer including what will be the future of the BusinessObjects universe.

In the latest BI 4 release, the BusinessObjects semantic layer and the universe design tool were re-designed and re-delivered for the first time in over two decades. It is hard to believe that SAP would seriously consider replacing it and, yet, they hardly ever talk about it. Maybe they are not planning to replace it but it has certainly lost its prominence within the SAP organization with so much hype around HANA with its in-memory database and analytic views.

It might be time for SAP to redress the balance and reassert their commitment to the Masters of the Universe.

Xcelsius : The Lego of Business Intelligence Dashboards

By
Paul
Published: October 15, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Highlights, Paul Blogs on BI, XcelsiusTags:
Xcelsius : The Lego of Business Intelligence Dashboards

I was just visiting a healthcare organization in Michigan and talking to a person in their HR department who recently attended an InfoSol Xcelsius immersion boot camp. He was so excited about what he had learned but even more elated about Xcelsius itself. He said, “It’s so logical and yet so limitless in possibilities, It’s like Lego , you can take the pieces and easily put them together anyway you want”.

I love this analogy!

Yes, Xcelsius is so like Legos. You can create amazing and dazzling business intelligence dashboards just by putting the parts together almost any way you want and, just like Legos, it has moving parts too!

All my kids grew up with Legos and always floored me with the incredible things they built – not only were they inventive but also functional and beautiful. It was remarkable how quickly they built their creations and then just as quickly transformed them into something else.

Well, Xcelsius is just like that. Every day, I see fantastic dashboards created by people everywhere, put together in just hours and then, just by changing a component, a background or an animation, turned into something equally sensational.

Xcelsius has been the premier BI dashboard solution for the last 10 years and it’s hard to see anything else out there that even comes close in terms of pure simplicity, versatility and capability. I look at the so called newer generation of BI dashboard tools like Tableau, Qlikview, Exploration Views or Visual Intelligence but none of these are anything like Legos! Not only are they not simple, they are restrictive and they are certainly not fun to use like Xcelsius.

You just never get tired of Legos because you are only limited by your imagination which for most people is limitless. You only have to visit one of the Legoland’s around the world and spend some time looking at the amazing creations as well as sitting in one of the many areas where you build your own masterpieces. Xcelsius is just the same. In fact, I think we should create an “Xcelsiusland” – a theme park full of amazing Xcelsius dashboards and virtual reality dashboard rides!

So what about the future of Xcelsius?

Well it has never looked better. Advanced caching capabilities like InfoBurst XDC and usage of universes against in-memory databases provide amazing performance against large sets of data. A new version of Xcelsius due for release this quarter allows most components to be generated in HTML5 for deployment on mobile devices. The Xcelsius component ecosystem continues to thrive with cool new components appearing everywhere like the new Dash Printer from DataSavvy that allows you to easily capture, manage and print Xcelsius dashboard content.

Lego just celebrated its 80th anniversary this year and continues to be as popular as ever and Xcelsius is hot on its heels!

 

A Tale of Two HANA’s

By
Paul
Published: September 24, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags:
A Tale of Two HANA’s

As SAP sells its Big Data in-memory appliance HANA into its installed based, we are starting to hear some interesting  implementation stories .

The first version of HANA was aimed at the Analytics market for real-time business intelligence applications with the promise of moving SAP BW and then other SAP ERP applications to HANA in subsequent releases.

SAP’s latest release of its Business Intelligence suite, BI 4.0, brought many new features that would integrate and take advantage of HANA’s in memory capabilities. This included a new semantic layer and the universe designer tool known now as the Information Design Tool (IDT) as well as enhancements to Web Intelligence , Xcelsius dashboards, Crystal Reports and Explorer.

So it came as some surprise to me to hear of two recent HANA implementations where SAP actually advised the customers not to use universes , Webi and other BI 4 tools with HANA even though both the clients involved were existing users of BusinessObjects XI 3.1.

The first client that I shall refer to as the “West Coast HANA”had an implementation of BusinessObjects XI 3.1 using Web Intelligence and Xcelsius dashboards. They wanted to use HANA for more real-time business intelligence against large sets of data derived from three different applications (one in the Cloud and two on-premise).   They were told by SAP not to use BusinessObjects universes for fear that too much data would be pulled back that would cause the BusinessObjects server to crash. They were instructed instead to use Explorer without a universe to go directly against the Analytic views of HANA’s  in memory database. This required significant data architecture work on the part of the client and since they wanted granularity of the data, SAP recommended creating a materialized view of the data on top of the Analytic view. This has created some performance issues with Explorer.

The second client who I shall call “East Coast HANA”also had an implementation of BusinessObjects XI 3.1 using Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence (that they have almost finished converting to Webi) and a few Xcelsius dashboards. They had purchased HANA specifically for Business Intelligence and planned to use Web Intelligence for their first HANA application. They were warned by SAP not to use Universes at BI 4.0 but the client decided this is the reason they bought HANA so they persisted anyway. The East Coast HANA client designed a new set of Analytic views on HANA to create an in-memory database for BI and then used the BI 4 IDT to create relational universe views on top of the Analytic views. The results were impressive running queries against over 300 million rows of data returning results instantly. Since the client was a long time BusinessObjects user they set limits on rows retrieved and CPU time and they have not had any issues on their BusinessObjects server. Needless to say they are very happy with the results.

This week I was in the UK telling this story to another SAP partner who was very surprised saying that they have been involved in successful HANA implementations using BI 4.0 universes and Web Intelligence.

It appears that universes and Web Intelligence are good for HANA. Maybe that message has just not made it to the US yet.

Beware of the SPOF

By
Paul
Published: July 30, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Beware of the SPOF

At a recent regional BusinessObjects user group meeting, an attendee from a large healthcare organization was telling me about his background in supporting the system administration of BusinessObjects and how he had become a “SPOF”.

Never having heard this term before I asked him what it meant and he explained it stood for “Single Point Of Failure”! Upon hearing this, I fell in love with the word and have been using it incessantly ever since.

With so many hardware and network platforms, operating systems, databases, applications, tools and Business Intelligence suites, more administrators and support specialists are needed than ever before and this often leads to a lot of “SPOFs “. The truth is that if you assign a single individual to support any application or platform and especially your BusinessObjects environment, you are taking a big risk.

Larger organizations will often have 2 or 3 people trained as BusinessObjects administrators but that will only be effective if all of them are working supporting and managing the environment on an on-going basis and staying current with both the latest software updates and changes to the platform.

A better approach is to have both an internal team and external backup support from a qualified partner consulting company. The internal team should be a minimum of two people but preferably three and they should work as a team supporting the administration and management of the BusinessObjects environment on a daily basis. Depending on the size and complexity of the implementation, this may range from an hour or two a day to as much as four to five hours a day. The tasks of the administrator include user and object security, configuration, performance monitoring and tuning, troubleshooting application and software issues, testing and installing fix packs and software updates and generally keeping the deployment running efficiently and effectively.

The reason for the external backup support is to have a reserve team to bring in and help out when the unexpected happens – things like people leaving, medical leave, vacations, reassignments, major upgrades or major issues. The external backup support team should preferably come from a certified partner who can provide senior qualified BusinessObjects administration experts and who have worked with you before and know your environment. Many organizations will have the external partner perform BusinessObjects health checks on a regular basis to maintain that familiarity with their system. These health checks often take the form of audits, performance tuning exercises or small administration projects and will last typically 3 to 5 days and delivered every 3, 4 or 6 months.

It is wise to avoid the SPOF or you could end up having to deal with a lot of MUD (Multiple Unexpected Downtimes)!

 

« Older Entries