Products Archive

Visit us at Booth 404 at ASUG

By
Yolande
Published: September 8, 2010Posted in: 360 View, Blog Featured, InfoBurst, Roambi, SAP Business Objects, XcelsiusTags:
Visit us at Booth 404 at ASUG

InfoSol will be a Diamond Sponsor at the 2010 ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference to be held in Orlando. Florida October 5-7.  The conference is expected to draw an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 BusinessObjects users.

InfoSol will be leading two session tracks during the conference : one highlighting Xcelsius Customer Case Studies and the other highlighting the next generation of BI report and dashboard publishing.  We have also been invited to participate as one of the selected Xcelsius Guru companies in an Xcelsius Gurus event at the conference.

InfoSol will be highlighting many of its value add solutions including InfoBurst and 360View. Several InfoSol partners are also sponsoring and exhibiting including Mellmo the developers of Roambi and Antivia the developers of XWIS.

Be sure to stop by the InfoSol booth (#404) to say hello and enter for our raffle to win an iPad.

Two Advantages of a Manual Maximum Calculation in Xcelsius

By
Amy
Published: August 4, 2010Posted in: Business Intelligence, Tech Tips, Xcelsius, Xcelsius End UserTags:
Two Advantages of a Manual Maximum Calculation in Xcelsius

Problem A: I have data that could be in the 1000s but sometimes could be 1 or 2.  Users do not want to see a division of 1.5 (or any part of a whole) since the data is tracking incidents and there are never “half incidents.”  How do I force the values to integers without losing the divisors for the high numbers (i.e. when there is 1000 maximum, I want to still see 250, 500, 750 divisors)?

 

Solution: Set a manual calculated maximum

{ =IF(MAX(AE15:AE26)<100,100,MAX(AE15:AE26)) } and then set the division number to 1.  With the division number to 1, it often also looks better to remove the grid lines (in case the data for the charts sometimes is much higher).

          

  Problem B:  I want to display a line chart on top of a stacked bar chart because there is no combination chart with this option.  My data for the stacked bar chart, however, is sometimes over 100 and sometimes under 100 and the extra space shifts the chart so that the two do not align.  How can I make the layered charts always align? 

 

 (Layered line chart does not line up with stacked bar chart when maximum is less than 100)

 

 (Layered line chart lines up with stacked bar chart when the maximum is over 100)

 

Note: If the charts are less than a magnitude different, the following method is a not-so-elegant-but-perhaps-acceptable workaround.  In the example above, I have emphasized the issue of alignment by making the different much greater in which case a more-involved display control of multiple charts may be the only acceptable option. 

Solution: Set a manual calculated maximum within an if() statement so that the maximum is always 100 or greater even if the stacked bar chart total is less than 100. (See above note for exception) 

 

This “fix” may not be acceptable for the right visual consumption. What may need to be done when the data is more than a magnitude of 10 different is to work with display properties for two charts with different widths based upon the maximum chart height formula instead.

Xcelsius Will Always Be Xcelsius

By
Paul
Published: August 3, 2010Posted in: Blog Featured, Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, Sapphirenow, XcelsiusTags: ,
Xcelsius Will Always Be Xcelsius

So what’s in a name? Some people will tell you “everything” while others will tell you it depends on what you are naming.

Some products have not only become defined by their name but have been so successful they end up defining all products of the same type like “Kleenex” and “Band-Aid” .  Others have found out that their product name can end up portraying the wrong image like Chevrolet’s Nova car – “No va” meaning “it doesn’t go” in Spanish! The French company Bull Computers also had a hard time with its “Bull” named products in North America.  However, Bull also launched a clever marketing campaign around the ambiguity of its name entitled “Know Bull” which did get some attention.

At this year’s Sapphire, Sir Richard Branson told this great story of how when he went to register the name “Virgin” for his company in the UK, the company registration official turned it down because they deemed the name as rude. So Branson returned the next day with a dictionary showing the definition of “virgin” as being pure and they accepted it.

So I have been somewhat intrigued about recent forum discussions surrounding SAP’s decision to rename Xcelsius – their amazing and very popular dashboard product.

Xcelsius already had some name recognition when Business Objects acquired Infommersion (the original developers) in November 2005 but then proceeded to rename it Crystal Xcelsius. This resulted in a lot of confusion as people started to relate the product to Crystal Reports and thought it was an add-on to this report writer product.  So when the next major release was developed, the decision was made to drop the Crystal name and so Xcelsius 2008 came to market.

For the last two years Xcelsius has become one of the most popular and prolifically used BI dashboard products in the marketplace and its name has become synonymous with data visualization and dynamic dashboards. 

So why would you take this very well known product with such a cool and catchy name as Xcelsius and rename it SAP Crystal Dashboard Design or SAP Enterprise Dashboard Design?

Well apparently this is because SAP uses a “master brand strategy” where SAP is the master brand and the product brand name takes a back seat. 

So why not SAP Xcelsius?

Well this is because SAP also uses “descriptive naming” for all its products so in the case of Xcelsius, the back seat has been completely removed!

Since “SAP Crystal Dashboard Design” is so long, it is bound to become abbreviated. However, I doubt this will be shortened to “SCDD” since a Google search points you to the “California State Council on Development Disabilities” .  It is more likely to become “Dashboard Design” since that is the new descriptive product name.  A Google search on “Dashboard Design” comes up with about 2.5 million results starting off with Qlikview, followed by Tableau Software then Corda and SAP Crystal Dashboard Design comes in at about number 14.  Interestingly, there is little ambiguity when you search on “Xcelsius”.

Translating Dashboard Design into other languages may also prove interesting.  Xcelsius will always translate into Xcelsius in all languages and I have a feeling the name will persist. At the end of the day, it is not just the name that counts, it’s the product itself. Xcelsius is as unique as a product as it is as a name. I will never forget that day in 2005 when I first saw it and was totally blown away. Infommersion created something truly amazing and ahead of its time. It remains top of its class and, for me, Xcelsius will always be Xcelsius.

Bursting Xcelsius Dashboards

By
Paul
Published: June 6, 2010Posted in: Blog Featured, InfoBurst, Infoburst 2009Tags: , , , ,
Bursting Xcelsius Dashboards

A company recently approached us with an interesting requirement concerning how to more efficiently distribute information about mobile phone usage to each of their hundreds of customers. The method they were currently using was manual and labor intensive as they were pulling information into Excel spreadsheets, creating graphs and then cutting and pasting into PowerPoint presentations that were emailed to their Account Managers who would present them to the various customers.

They had seen Xcelsius dashboards and were impressed by the dynamic visualization and felt this could make both an attractive and appealing way to present the information to their clients. However, they were faced with several challenges regarding automatically populating the dashboards initially and then automatically distributing them as standalone offline entities that could be used by both their Account Managers and clients without being connected back to the originating system.

They did not want to run separate jobs for each client to populate each dashboard. They wanted to run one job that would provide all the statistics for all customers and then split or burst that data by customer to feed each customer’s unique data into the same dashboard template. The amount of data that would be initially retrieved was large (many tens of thousands of rows) and even some of the individual customer dashboards had a fair amount of data (several thousand rows). Once the data had been burst for each customer it would need to be populated into the dashboard template, published as a shockwave file (SWF) and attached to an email that would need to be sent to the right group of people for each dashboard.

While this may seem like a tall order, the new InfoBurst 2009 solution was able to achieve all this relatively simply and quickly. InfoBurst 2009 is a scheduling, bursting and publishing solution for both Business Intelligence reports and dashboards . It has a built-in scheduler that can be either time or event based triggered. The event can be the result of a SQL statement which makes it very versatile for starting a job only when data has changed or other dependent events have occurred. InfoBurst can accept data from SQL, a Stored Procedure or a Business Intelligence query or report (Web Intelligence, Crystal, Desktop Intelligence, Microsoft Reporting Services etc.).

When handling Xcelsius dashboards, InfoBurst 2009 uses unique mechanisms for both ‘OFFLINE’ and ‘CONNECTED’ distribution requirements.

 For a ‘CONNECTED’ scenario, the Cache can be accessed from the Xcelsius dashboard in a variety of ways so that only the data required for a particular component of the dashboard is retrieved when required. We provide a number of components that we collectively call ‘INTELLIGENT CACHE’. The CACHE QUERY mechanism in InfoBurst 2009 allows you to use the full power and capability of SQL to selectively retrieve, aggregate and sort the data required for your Xcelsius dashboard from the Cache. The CROSSTAB mechanism allows you to generate crosstab tables in advance or on-demand. The FLIP mechanism allows you to PIVOT an existing Crosstab, switching the X and Y axis data. These features save an enormous amount of time and effort over other methods of pulling data into an Xcelsius dashboard and it’s fast! For ultimate flexibility, it is possible to have multiple caches and to populate a cache with data from multiple data sources.

 For an ‘OFFLINE’ scenario, InfoBurst 2009 is able to create and manage separate ranges within the Cache, and Burst these ranges to a common Dashboard, embedding the data inside of the SWF file and delivering the same Xcelsius dashboard with different data for each individual client.

InfoBurst 2009 also has intelligent distribution capabilities where it can read from an LDAP compliant address book, a database table or an Excel spreadsheet to select the relevant email addresses or target destinations for the dashboard or report. Since this customer required the offline dashboards to be sent via email , the information was read from a database table containing all the individual’s information and is able to determine the customer name and criteria and select just the email address for the relevant recipients.

This company is now using InfoBurst 2009 to distribute offline Xcelsius dashboards automatically , intelligently and swiftly to its customers and is saving a lot of time and money in the process.

For more information or a free demonstration and trial on InfoBurst 2009, go to www.InfoBurst2009.com

Sustainability and Sizzle at Sapphire – Day 1

By
Paul
Published: May 23, 2010Posted in: Paul Blogs on BI, Roambi, SapphirenowTags:
Sustainability and Sizzle at Sapphire – Day 1

For a humble BusinessObjects follower used to attending conferences where 3,000 attendees was considered big, stepping into my first SAP Sapphire event was somewhat like the small town guy going to the city for the first time.  With some 15,000 attendees, an exhibit and keynote area the size of half a dozen football fields and “no expense spared” technology on display everywhere, it was quite an experience. At times it felt like being at a baseball game with line ups for food, bathrooms and big projection screens showing live events in progress everywhere.

The incredible number of sessions , demos , exhibits and collaboration meetings means you can only participate in a fraction of what is available and you need to be quite discriminating – it’s a bit like going to Disneyworld and, in fact, I think by the second day a lot of people did wander off there!

The keynotes on the first day were impressive starting with an interview style session with Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Empire. He provided some excellent insights into the success of Virgin explaining how employees who are proud of the company they work for will more likely be passionate about their jobs.  Branson also stressed the importance of reducing carbon emissions and talked about the new “carbon currency” and how they were working on new “clean” fuels projects producing fuels that will not harm the environment.

This aptly led into the second keynote from Al Gore who talked eloquently and intelligently about the importance of the sustainability initiative that is becoming an integral component of companies and institutions around the world.  Gore emphasized the need to build consensus and the brand enhancement that many companies are gaining by going green and implementing sustainability initiatives.  SAP has made a commitment to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% over the coming years while still substantially growing the company.

SAP had set up a whole segment in the exhibit area dedicated to its Sustainability offerings. I sat in on one of the presentations and was impressed at how comprehensive and integrated it appeared to be. 

Paul Grill, Giant iPad and Santiago Becerra

With so much to see in the Exhibit area, I tended to gravitate at first to the booths that had the most traffic. Since everyone appeared to be raffling off an iPad (no shortage here!), there had to be something more appealing to draw people in. That was certainly the case at the Mellmo booth with their giant-sized iPhone and iPad displaying its Roambi solution with some amazingly visual Business Intelligence analytics. Since SAP has identified one of its three major initiatives for this year as being mobile integration and delivery, this was a hot topic at Sapphire and RoamBi was white hot.

The best presentations I attended were the customer case studies and there was a great one in the Small and Medium Enterprise track where 3 customers were interviewed about the business benefits realized after implementing SAP Business Intelligence solutions.  One of the customers was an on-line supermarket chain and he explained how implementing BusinessObjects with a Data Mart allowed them to see that they were receiving a large number of complaints about their egg deliveries – mainly that some of the eggs were cracked or damaged. Their BusinessObjects solution allowed them to drill down on this data on a daily basis and analyze further what might be the potential causes. They subsequently discovered that there were a much larger number of complaints with eggs delivered in cardboard cartons compared to plastic cartons so they switched to plastic cartons only. In addition they implemented a simple new procedure for the packer to quickly visually check the eggs in the carton prior to packaging. The result of these two actions was a 75% reduction in complaints of egg deliveries.

I love these type of stories because it so clearly shows that Business Intelligence is a combination of analyzing data and human interpretation and action on the results.

All in all, it was a “cracking” first day at Sapphire!

Xcelsius Dashboards – Best Practices – Data Layout

By
Roxanne
Published: April 22, 2010Posted in: InfoBurst-XDS, XDM, XcelsiusTags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

In addition to the Xcelsius Dashboard Maintenance – Best Practices – Using Labels in Excel I wanted to share other important aspects of making Xcelsius dashboards easy to maintain and for other developers to understand.  One such practice is having some kind of conformity in your approach to how you lay out the data for your Xcelsius project. 

In this blog I will discuss 2 methods, both of which are valid and are useful ways to organize dashboard data.  Deciding as an organization which approach you adopt can help with the process of taking up someone else’s project. 

 Some Xcelsius developers like to use a method of having all the data that is being used in the dashboard on one (or more) tab/s of the Excel spreadsheet, and then as you need to use data for display, using a series of vlookups or match & index functions for displaying data on charts, which they layout on other tabs of the spreadsheet.

My preferred method is to spread the layout in such a way that the names of the Excel tabs generally correspond to the functional area on the Xcelsius dashboard, perhaps even the same name of the Xcelsius  tab (Either the Tab Set Container or the Label based menu, is what I’m thinking of), so that all the data being expressed on that “page” of the dashboard is on one tab in the Excel spreadsheet behind the scenes. 

  

I like to have the data insert & any manipulations I have to do for expressing that data nearby the loaded data, so that it is all in one place & I can find it easily.  The only difficulty with this is when you have many components on one “page” or you have to create several aggregate levels to display.  Spreading it out & spacing it can become an issue, and this is where again, labeling the spreadsheet is so important.  (But aren’t we glad that if we move data around on the spreadsheet that the links follow, for those of you who have been using Xcelsius since the 4.5 days!). 

This approach, of course, assumes you have the aggregated data to work with!  Which leads back to my previous blog regarding data connectivity options.   If I have to use QaaWS, I end up having to do a lot of manipulation in the universe to get the data to look or be ordered the way I want to use it in Xcelsius.  I usually have to end up making many of what I call, “dimensionalized measures” when I want to end up with a crosstab result.  So I have a measure for Jan Sales, Feb Sales, etc.  Very tedious.  Sorting is another  issue that is often easier addressed in the universe, but also can be labor intensive.  

Live Office gives me the option to create crosstabs and sort the data in any way I wish and I can also have multiple tabs to aggregate the data at different levels (YTD, MTD,  past 30 days, etc).  The problem that I so often bump into with this approach is the amount of data when we get down to the detail level.  We have all experienced poor performance any time we go over the 512 row default and horrible performance when we approach 1000 rows. 

All of these are reasons why I enjoy using the InfoBurst XDS or XDM option, as it addresses all these issues, plus gives me many more options.  The Intelligent Cache syntax of this tool is by far the most exciting feature, in my opinion.  Using their syntax, I can pass parameters to the XML url call and only return the rows of data I wish to display.  For example, within my xml url call, I can add syntax that returns …. YEAR=2009;DIVISION=HPD;DEPT=23.  This ability to extract just the rows of data I want to display helps keep my dashboards very responsive, since I am not loading it down with too much data.  It also gives me the ability to go to a much more detailed level than I would have been able to with QaaWS or LiveOffice.

XDS or XDM also has syntax to return unique values of a particular column from an xml data set which I can use for  my selector.  My selector will always have accurate values, as it is loaded from the current xml cache, rather than from a hard-coded list in my Excel spreadsheet which may not be up-to-date.

And, I have the flexibility to create these large XML data sets from a Web Intelligence document or by writing a query, directly to the database, or even from an Excel spreadsheet, and any combination of all three!

Data Quality Dashboards

By
Moksh
Published: April 20, 2010Posted in: Business Intelligence, Infoburst 2009, XcelsiusTags: , , ,
Data Quality Dashboards

The stream of articles, white papers and videos desperately trying to convince the business community of the negative impact of poor data quality on their bottom line seems to be never ending.  It almost seems like the IT brigade is marching into a cul-de-sac at the end of which is a brick wall with three large letters written on it – ‘ROI’.  Data Quality projects share their dreaded fate with all other projects emanating from the IT division and including the geeky word ‘data’ in their title.  While the management continues to remain blissfully ignorant of the unsettling financial and human consequences of bad data, customers, employees and business itself continues to suffer from ‘Data Quality Blues’.

The one technology in recent years that has managed to captivate the business users in organizations across the globe is undoubtedly – Dashboards.  Dashboards speak to them in a language which they are familiar with, the language of graphs, charts and metrics.  The BI Dashboard serves as an abstraction layer that shields the business users from the intricate and unwelcoming world of the ‘Data Churners’.  It is this instrument therefore, that should be leveraged to enlighten the management of financial losses that are incurred due to a seemingly trivial typo error or a misplaced digit in the sales figures.  Although this may not be the panacea one is looking for, creating a real-time dashboard which attaches a price tag to every data quality issue and extrapolates the figures to demonstrate their long term impact, may just act like a sip of coffee that will stimulate their business senses.

 Here’s an example of a Data Quality Dashboard

 This dashboard was the outcome of the convergence of three technologies: BO Data Quality,  InfoBurst 2009,  and Xcelsius.  Bundling a DQ dashboard with DQ Services benefits in the following ways: 

  • Getting the initial buy in from the senior management
  • Understanding the DQ issues that are creating havoc
  • Tracking the performance of the DQ initiative itself
  • Displaying the relevant financial metrics to answer the ROI question
.
Photo Credit: Sieve photo in this post from Wikimedia

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!

Xcelsius Dashboard Maintenance – Best Practices – Using Labels in Excel

By
Roxanne
Published: April 16, 2010Posted in: XcelsiusTags: , , ,

In this post I will share with you a sample of what I consider to be one of many “best practices” to help in the ongoing maintenance of Xcelsius dashboards; Using labels in your Excel Spreadheet.  Some of the content in this post is extracted from the Excel for Xcelsius course offered by InfoSol. 

 Whether you find yourself having to update one of your own dashboards after a period of time of not working on it, or having to hand off the maintenance of the dashboard to a colleague, the initial effort of good documentation will save valuable hours and ensure continuity and success.  In this post some of the graphics will speak for themselves – you know the cliche of ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. 

The graphics show examples of: 

  • good labeling,
  • use of color to enhance visual cues
  • and the use of comments within Excel. 

Use of Color and Labeling

Below are samples of Excel spreadsheets that incorporates the use of visual cues like color coding with simple, clear and easy to follow labels showing where components derive their inputs.

Using Excel Comments

Another helpful option is to use the built in Excel feature of Inserting a Comment.  This leaves a small red triangle in the top right corner of a cell to indicate that a comment has been added to that cell. When the mouse hovers over the cell, the comment pops up. 

 

Helpful tips can be included within the comment.

Comments can be added to any cell by right-clicking on a cell and selecting “Insert Comment”.  Once a comment has been added to a cell, the small red triangle will appear.  A comment can be edited or deleted by right-clicking on the cell.

Using a Legend

There are many ways to document your Xcelsius Dashboard Excel Spreadsheet. 

I would love to hear about your “Best Practices”.

There is an Xcelsius Bootcamp being offered in Track 4 of this year’s IBIS 2010 event June 6-9 - Seeing Beyond Business Intelligence. 

Europe Trip 2010: Day 4 Lyon – Ease of Use Combined with Security

By
Paul
Published: April 12, 2010Posted in: 360 View, Business Intelligence, Europe Trip 2010, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Europe Trip 2010: Day 4 Lyon – Ease of Use Combined with Security

As I checked out of my hotel in Paris, I had finally figured out how to use my high-tech, multi-functional room key. When I checked in, I was given a room card key with some writing on it that I did not pay attention to until I got to the door of my room and could not find anywhere to insert the card. After struggling for a minute, I finally looked at the card which had the words “wave at the door” written in multiple languages.  So I checked nobody was in the corridor and feeling very silly, I waved at the door with my left hand. Nothing happened.  I tried waving with my right hand and several variations of wave including the “Queen of England” wave which is quite slow and deliberate.

Then it dawned on me that I was supposed to wave the room key card at the door. This, of course, worked and a green light lit up and I was able to open the door. The room was pitch black inside and so I fumbled around for a light switch but to no avail.  However I did see a red glow on the wall on the right which was a square plate about the size of a regular light switch. I tried waving my room key at it but nothing happened. I felt around the plate and discovered it had a slot on top. I put my room key in the slot (I know, a stroke of genius especially after waving at the door with my hand!) and all the lights came on.

Anyway, I had to laugh to myself as I left the hotel to take the train to Lyon at my first encounter with a wave room key. When I arrived at the train station, I had to validate my ticket by placing it in a machine which recorded and stamped it – no human ticket collectors.

I left the train in Lyon and headed straight for my appointment with a partner where I was treated to a demonstration (over lunch of course) of the newest version of 360View Plus. This is the neat security management tool for BusinessObjects XI that allows you to view and manage user and object security access. The tool has this really cool security matrix grid that allows you to modify access rights with a single click on the relevant cell. It can also produce these fantastic reports in Excel that show different security access for users and objects that are really useful for auditing purposes. Anyway, the product has new drag and drop features making it even easier to manage security settings as well as the ability to automatically schedule the security audit reports.

Although in most BusinessObjects environments a small number of people tend to manage security, it is still important to make the task easy and intuitive. 360View Plus allows that and, in addition, makes it just as easy for Help Desk staff to have the ability to reset access so that key BusinessObjects administrators do not have to be involved with these tasks. Best of all 360View Plus provides the capability to manage multiple BO instances (CMS’s) from a single interface enabling remote security management of different sites as well as comparing security rights between environments.

As I returned to the station to take a train to Grenoble, I needed to buy a ticket. I just walked up to a machine with a touch screen and selected my preferences and paid by credit card on the spot. Since the train I was taking left in 10 minutes, the machine pre-validated my ticket prior to issuing it and once again, I boarded without any human intervention.

The need for automated simple user interfaces combined with solid security is a clear differentiator in today’s fast moving world. France certainly appears to be one of the innovators here.

Of course, it may take a little time for us non-French to catch on but you will not see me waving at a door in a hotel ever again!

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