We hope you can join us at the next information packed Bay Area BusinessObjects™ User Group (Northern California) meeting on Monday, May 7, 2012, 8:00 am – 4:30 pm hosted by Creative Technology & Training Solutions and InfoSol.

Attendance is free, however; we do ask that you register for count purposes.

LOCATION

 AZBOCUG

We also hope you can join us at the next information packed Arizona Business Objects and Crystal User Group (AZBOCUG) meeting Thursday, May 10, 2012, 12:30-4:00 PM.

Attendance is free, however; we do ask that you register for count purposes.

LOCATION

The meeting will be held in Room Q120 – Building Q, Room 120. Building Q is located at the south end of campus off of Grovers Avenue. There is parking in the WEST parking lot.  Location map here.

View Agenda

 InfoSol will be presenting at both of these meetings.  We hope to see you there.

InfoBurst enables Xcelsius dashboards to handle large amounts of data with fast performance using its powerful XML data caching capability and to deliver those dashboards both connected and off-line to a variety of destinations including mobile devices like iPads and Androids. Some of the InfoBurst Xcelsius features include :

• An XML data cache able to support millions of rows of data for fast access from Xcelsius dashboards
• A write back connector for Xcelsius allowing write back from the dashboard to any database
• A “Save as Excel” function enabling the dashboard contents to be saved in Excel
• Creation , customized bursting and intelligent delivery of offline dashboards

http://www.bpms.co.uk/events/infoburst-test-drive—19th-april.aspx

Excerpt: Infoburst Test Drive – 19th April
blueprint uk performance management, financial planning & budgeting, business intelligence and data warehousing services allow clients to visualise and control the processes that directly affect success with professional…

The first was Xcelsius, the data visualization dashboard tool that rocketed first Business Objects and then SAP to the forefront of business intelligence dashboard solutions. Santiago once told me that the idea for Xcelsius came about after a casual conversation with one of his sons, who was a computer game developer, about making business applications more visual and interactive like computer games. Santiago had created “Gamification” before it had even become a word (according to Wikipedia it was first used in March 2004 several years after Xcelsius was created). Xcelsius was not only ahead of its time, it was a game changer for Business Objects after they acquired the company from Santiago in late 2005 as within two years it was their hottest selling product and was taking over as the user interface of choice for business intelligence.

Roambi Cardex on iPad

After seeing Xcelsius successfully settled into Business Objects, Santiago moved into semi-retirement but his visionary mind could not stop conjuring up new ideas. After seeing a line of people queuing up for an iPhone, he bought one for himself and became intrigued by its visual display capabilities. This led to inspired, revolutionary BI solution number 2. Gathering together some of the original team that had made Xcelsius successful and some very talented developers, he created the most spectacular BI visualization solution ever seen on a mobile device – Roambi. Today, Roambi is the leading BI visualization solution for mobile devices with a plethora of awards and an ever increasing global presence, Some of the Roambi views like Cardex and Squares have got to be seen to be believed (especially on the iPad) – these are designs of pure genius. You can download demo versions for free off the iTunes store.

Roambi Squares on iPad

Needless to say, I was ecstatic when Santiago Becerra agreed to deliver the keynote address at this year’s IBIS 2012 event. With the theme of the conference being Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0, it is a perfect match-up. Few people have contributed more than Santiago to inspiring the world of Business Intelligence.

Equally as exciting, is a new executive seminar track at this year’s IBIS also entitled Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0 that will consist of 12 customer presented case studies on some pretty cool and inspired BI solutions. The final list of customer presentations will be announced in a couple of weeks so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I suggest you reserve a place at IBIS 2012 very soon as the event is limited to just 250 attendees and seats are filling up fast.

Register now.

Thinking that I must have clicked on the wrong link on the download site, I tried again retracing my steps… Yes, I did this several times before I searched the Internet and found that others are having this difficulty as well!

Xcelsius release notes indeed say that Office 2010 was supported. Hmmm!

And, with some effort, I guess it is, but only after you change a lot of security settings within Office 2010!!!
Now, the order in which you install Office 2010 and Xcelsius SP4 still seems to be a toss-up with the majority of users favoring an upgrade to Office 2010 first followed by the Xcelsius upgrade. Either way you will need to do a lot of adjustments to security within Excel 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 in order to get Xcelsius to “play nice” with them!!! If you do not, you will experience bizarre behavior within PowerPoint. For example, if you export your dashboard to PowerPoint 2010 and open it up as a slideshow, you will miss your mouse as you move over the embedded dashboard making it impossible to interact with the dashboard. You will also get a lot of “server busy” messages when opening Xcelsius, as it is talking to Excel and applying lots of security options that are set by default when you install Office 2010.

Below, I have documented the steps I have taken to get Excel 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 to work well with Xcelsius 2008 SP4.

Download Service Pack 4 for Xcelsius

1.) Go to SAP Business Objects software download site

2.) Software product: Dashboard Presentation Design (Xcelsius)
3.) Product Version: Xcelsius 2008
4.) Click on the link that says Xcelsius Present 2008 Service Pack 4….(see screen shot below)…

download Xcelsius SP4

5.) The file will be named: xcelsiuspres2008_sp4.zip (see screen shot below). Save to your computer.

save file

6.) Un-zip the files to your local machine. All files contained within the above zipped file say Service Pack 3. Hmmm! This is not correct, I think it should say service pack 4!

Install Office 2010

Refer to Office 2010 install package…

Install Xcelsius Service Pack 4

7.) Double-click on the Setup.exe file in the extracted file list…
8.) When you actually install this service pack your version of Xcelsius should be:
Version: 5.4.0.0
Build: 12,4,0,116

Install Xcelsius

Configure Office PowerPoint 2010 Trusted Settings
To get rid of missing mouse in PowerPoint…

• PowerPoint 2010: Settings should be under File>Options>Trust Center>Trust Center Settings>
• Active X Settings: Enable All controls without restrictions and without prompting
• Trusted Locations: Disable All trusted locations
• Privacy Options: Un-Click All

Configure Office Excel 2010 Trusted Settings

To get rid of “server busy” message in Xcelsius 2008 SP4

• Excel 2010 settings: File>Options> Trust Center>Trust Center Settings>
• Active X Settings: Enable All controls without restrictions and without prompting
• Protected View: None checked
• Message bar: Never show information about blocked content
• File Block Settings: None checked and Open selected file types in Protected View and allow editing
• Privacy Options: Un-Click All

I welcome your comments and experience.

It is undoubtedly a major new release of the long and successful BusinessObjects product suite. It includes a new semantic layer and universe designer, known as the Information Design Tool (IDT), with enhanced capabilities including native access to OLAP data sources. There are exciting new functionalities in Web Intelligence with hierarchal data analysis and new charting capabilities. Xcelsius 4.0 integrates with the new semantic layer and includes the query panel in the Designer tool allowing direct binding of universe objects to visualizations. There are two new versions of Crystal Reports and Advanced Analysis the new OLAP analysis tool that replaces Voyager. In addition there is a bunch of new functionality in the platform for monitoring, auditing, version control and event management plus a whole bunch more for integration with SAP and SAP BW. BI 4.0 is also based on 64-bit architecture.

All of this adds up to a lot of new code and new integration. While extensive testing has been underway in both the beta and ramp up releases, the new software is for the most part untried in the challenging production environments of existing BusinessObjects enterprise deployments. This is due to some degree to the fact that previous new releases of the BusinessObjects suite have had issues (XI 3.0 and BO 6.0 quickly come to mind). Most existing customers prefer to wait for one of two service packs (not fix packs) before venturing into a new release.

There is also the consideration that there are some pretty important items missing from the BI 4.0 release such as the Microsoft .net SDK’s (used by many 3^rd party add-on solutions) and the integration with SharePoint .

Many existing classic BusinessObjects customers have large numbers of Desktop Intelligence reports which will no longer be supported in BI 4.0. This will be a huge conversion project for many of them that will be difficult to justify from a tangible return on investment viewpoint.

However, for many SAP ERP customers, BI 4.0 is long overdue and they need the better integration it offers as soon as possible so I would expect many of them to look to adopt early. Customers implementing BusinessObjects for the first time may also benefit from starting with BI 4.0.

As for the existing BusinessObjects ,Crystal and Xcelsius based customers, it would be good to use the next 12 months to try out the release in a test environment and start to become familiar with the new functionality while testing items from your existing deployment with the new platform. This would also allow you to better plan for what new functionality would benefit your business the most and to learn it thoroughly before deploying. For those with large numbers of Desktop Intelligence reports, it provides time to consider options and convert at a sustainable pace and, dare I say, for SAP to even reconsider the Desktop Intelligence support decision.

Image Credit: http://www.presentermedia.com/

Last week I received an email from the father of a girl who I used to coach on my soccer team. The email was entitled “Bragging Rights and Thank You” and he explained how his daughter had just been selected for the High School All Regions First Team. She is only a sophomore and helped her high school varsity team to win the State Championship in their division.

Coach Paul with the Desert Elite

I first coached her at our soccer club when she was 10 years old and she transitioned with me from recreational to competitive soccer. She was fast and fearless and it was not difficult to see that she had natural talent on the soccer field. During the 5 years I coached her, I encouraged her simply to do what she loved most which was to play well, be creative and have fun. I just watched from the sidelines and cheered as she improved and dazzled us all with new skills with each game.

Anyway, her father was justifiably proud and the “bragging rights” were in order.

So the day after, I receive an email from a customer who has been troubleshooting an Xcelsius dashboard issue with the help of one of our consultants, Roxanne.

Roxanne had suggested to the customer to create a copy of the dashboard and create new queries and XML cache’s with new names.  The customer was emailing to say that since doing this, he has been unable to recreate his original problem and is happy it is working.  He added a postscript that said,

“ I have to mention I used your name in naming the queries, xml caches etc while recreating. This must have had a positive effect”

 So it appears by naming the dashboard queries and XML caches “Roxanne” something, his problem is solved and his dashboard is running great! Well, I could not let this pass without both sharing it and bragging about it.

Roxanne is one of InfoSol’s top consultants and a true Xcelsius guru. Unlike my soccer player, she was a little more than 10 years-old when she learned BusinessObjects and Xcelsius but , just like my soccer player,  I simply encouraged her to do what she loved most which was to be creative and have fun. The result is a Business Intelligence Superstar whose mere name causes queries to behave and run better!!

If you want to determine if my bragging rights are justified, you can attend the Xcelsius  Master Hands-on Bootcamp at this year’s IBIS2011  which will be taught by Roxanne and witness first hand her amazing talents or you could just rename your dashboard queries after her!

The simple answer is “no” and there are many good reasons to upgrade to XI 3.1 as soon as possible.

Firstly, BusinessObjects XI 3.1 has been the general release for a couple of years now and has proven to be a stable and solid platform. It brings a new version of Web Intelligence with the Rich Client (offline) capability with access to external data providers like Excel. It also has other features, previously only available in Desktop Intelligence, like the fold/unfold feature and stored procedure support through the universe. It adds new functionality also like the ability to track data changes between versions, contextual hyperlinking and use of drop-down selection boxes for prompts.

At the same time, XI 3.1 fully supports Desktop Intelligence reports unchanged which is quite significant when you consider that there will be no support for Desktop Intelligence in XI 4. This means that XI 3.1 will be the last BusinessObjects release to support Desktop Intelligence or the old Full Client reports.

BusinessObjects XI 4.0 will be a major new release with a lot of new functionality some of which will be available in the first 4.0 release and some which will be released later in service pack updates. It will be a 64-bit software application. It will have a new semantic layer that will combine the capabilities of the old BusinessObjects universe and Crystal Business Views and with a slew of new functionality including support of OLAP (MDX) data sources like SAP BW and MS OLAP cubes. The old BusinessObjects Universe Designer will remain supported in XI 4 for compatibility and easier transition.

There are new functionalities and capabilities in Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, Crystal and other content providers including taking advantage of the new semantic layer and universe design tool. There are two versions of Crystal – Crystal Enterprise which is new and uses the new semantic layer and Crystal Reports 2011 which is a continuation of Crystal Reports 2008. There is a new OLAP analysis tool called Advanced Analysis which replaces Voyager and there are significant improvements to Data Services and the BOE infrastructure functionality.

There will also be a new utility to move the contents of your old BusinessObjects content to XI 4. The Import Wizard is effectively replaced by this new tool called the Upgrade Manager Tool. This works for upgrades from XI 3.1 and the plan is to also be able to upgrade from XI R2 with security model changes. There is no upgrade available from earlier releases meaning you would need to move to XI R2 or XI 3.1 before moving to XI 4.

The ramp up will probably last 3 to 6 months so the general availability of XI 4.0 is expected sometime between February 2011 and May 2011. It is unlikely that the first service pack will be available until late in the year and most existing BO customers will probably not look at moving to XI 4 until 2012 or 2013 (based on previous trends).

For these BO customers still using Desktop Intelligence, there will be the added consideration and work of converting or replacing their old reports with Web Intelligence which for some may be a considerable effort and cost.

According to information disseminated at the ASUG BO annual conference in October, in addition to Desktop Intelligence, the following other existing BO XI products will be end of  life :  Voyager, Encyclopedia/Discussions and Performance Manager.

Historically, the current and immediately prior software releases tend to be actively supported for all software issues which would suggest that at some point in 2011 only XI 4.0 and XI 3.1 will be considered the actively supported releases.

Taking all of this information into consideration, it does make sense to upgrade to BusinessObjects XI 3.1 in the coming months if you have not done so already.

This year Xcelsius dashboards shared the limelight with Mobile Business Intelligence in terms of the most popular topics being discussed amongst attendees.

There was also some buzz around the new BusinessObjects XI 4.0 release promising to be the first truly integrated business intelligence platform. While there were a few small demonstrations of some of the new XI 4.0 products in the general session, most of the other sessions stuck to slides and pre-recorded Camtasia demonstrations.  With the release moving to “ramp up” stage in November, the kimono was only half opened on some of the new features and functions. These included the new Data Services that will now incorporate Text Analytics in addition to Data Integrator and Data Quality in a single engine solution. Also, there is the new Universal Metadata Layer that not only combines Business Views and Universes but also now provides direct access to Multidimensional OLAP data sources.

Part of the integration approach with XI 4.0  is to provide common services across all the main content provider tools like Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, Explorer. These include a common query panel for accessing data through a universe so in the new Xcelsius Enterprise 4.0 developers would have access to universe objects while building the dashboard.

An updated Web Intelligence brings new charting libraries from the Explorer product and an update Crystal Reports delivers a new grid view with drag and drop on graphics capability.

Common platform services like Auditing and Life Cycle Manager now extend across all the content provider tools including Xcelsius.

SAP’s new solution for in-memory analytics, known as HANA (High performance ANalytical Appliance), was also discussed.

Once the ramp up period gets underway, we will have a better chance to more thoroughly explore the new features and functions but based on this sneak preview, there appears to be some promising new functionality in XI 4.

The story started me thinking about software compliance which has unfortunately gained a dominant presence in the Business Intelligence space in the last couple of years. While it is known that in some parts of the world, software is often pirated or used illegally that is not usually the case in North America. Most companies use their software according to the license under which they purchased it.  However, as hardware technology has improved with dramatic increases in processing power and memory capacity along with even more dramatic reductions in price, software companies have felt a need to change their licensing rules so they would not lose out on revenue and profits. So with the onset of multi-core CPU processors, there is often a fee with the additional cores. For example, with BusinessObjects software, a dual-core CPU may be charged at 1.5 CPU’s for software licensing (1 CPU for the first core and 50% for additional cores) and a quad-core CPU would be charged at 2.5 CPU’s.  So if you own a 2 CPU license of your BusinessObjects software and then move it to a new server that has 2 CPU’s but those CPU’s happen to be quad-core processors, you would actually find yourself needing to buy 3 more CPU licenses of the software in order to be in compliance. Any configuration that results in a half CPU  (like 3 x Dual Core CPU’s equally 4.5 CPU’s) will be rounded up to the next whole number of CPUs (5 CPU’s). Since it is very hard to purchase single core CPU processors these days, many companies are finding themselves facing unexpected and significant software fees. The software companies themselves have caught on to this and sometimes send out an audit form the customer must fill out to state the hardware that the software is running on or, sometimes, they perform remote audits by phone or web cast.

If your BusinessObjects software is licensed by Named User as opposed to CPU, there is no limitation on the number of CPU’s and servers that you can deploy on with the Enterprise level products (EDGE is restricted to one server). This is an advantage from the standpoint of performance and scalability but it also means that you need to purchase a separate license for each named user who will be using the software. In the BusinessObjects world, access to the different products and functions is controlled through the Central Management Console (CMC).  Sometimes customers accidently turn on functions, like the Web Intelligence Interactive Viewer, without knowing if they are licensed to use this or for how many users.  Other companies will map their Active Directory users to the CMC without realizing that they may not own sufficient licenses for all the users in Active Directory.

So how can you check your Business Intelligence software licensing is in compliance and avoid these accidental non-compliance issues before you are faced with a large, unexpected and unwelcome invoice? 

One way is to use a company like InfoSol who is intimately familiar with the BusinessObjects licensing rules to perform a Software License Audit service to validate what you are actually using versus what you are licensed to use.  There is also a software product that InfoSol uses in its audit service called Integrity that automatically checks the CMC for license compliance. This product may also be purchased through InfoSol. These services can be performed remotely or on-site and are a fraction of the cost that most license non-compliance situations would cost.

Of course, you could try the same approach as the farmer who built his castle behind the haystacks but it may not be a risk worth taking.

If you wish to see a photo and read the story about the Hidden Castle, visit  Telegraph.co.uk

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.