Web intelligence Archive

Regional BO Crystal User Groups Alive and Thriving

By
Paul
Published: August 25, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Xcelsius End UserTags: , ,
Regional BO Crystal User Groups Alive and Thriving

In the last two months, I have attended three regional independent BusinessObjects and Crystal User Group Meetings that have simply been amazing both in terms of their content and user participation. One was in Pennsylvania, one in Michigan and one in Arizona. Each one had between 50 to 70 attendees, was hosted at a customer site and was free to attend.
More significantly, each one had real world case studies and live demonstrations of solutions, many presented by customers, that were both educational and useful.
A gentleman from the State of Michigan presented his experiences in using Xcelsius while teaching the do’s and don’ts to novice and new users that was as entertaining as it was informative.
A demonstration of the new Web Intelligence 4.0 brought rounds of applause when showing the new graphics and “print to page” features.
A session on converting Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence documents had attendees captivated and taking copious notes on their iPads.
A manager from a Fortune 50 company presenting and demonstrating a case study of a new distributed dashboard they developed for one of their clients that has both saved them and their client significant time and resources was just sensational.
However, there was one presentation that just completely blew me away and left the audience awestruck. It was about advanced data visualization in BusinessObjects and how to create more visual graphic representations in Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence and Xcelsius. Creating heat maps in Crystal Reports was pretty cool, but creating animated Venn Diagrams in Xcelsius was just phenomenal. If everyone’s jaw had not dropped far enough, the presenter then shared a small personal project he had been working on that left us all speechless.
He kept a betta fish in a tank in his office and he used a web cam along with some software he downloaded from the internet to track the movements of his fish over a 24 hour period. The software allowed him to load all these coordinates into a database. He then accessed this database through Xcelsius to create a playback animation of the movements of the betta fish that could be sped up, slowed down and even add in a 5 second bubble trail to show more precise movement! The audience was stunned and I was so completely lost for words that the only question I could ask was “What was the name of his fish?”. It’s name was “Betta” as simple and as brilliant as the solution itself!
So I have to say that these BusinessObjects Crystal regional user group meetings are just the best thing going on out there right now in the BusinessObjects community. The education, innovative ideas and uniqueness of these gatherings is just unparalleled . I can’t wait till the next one!

Web Intelligence vs. Xcelsius vs. Explorer

By
Paul
Published: July 31, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, XcelsiusTags: , , ,
Web Intelligence vs. Xcelsius vs. Explorer

I was recently at a BusinessObjects user group meeting in Pennsylvania and a representative from SAP who was presenting asked the audience of about 50 attendees if any of them were using SAP Explorer. Not a single person raised their hand. He then asked how many of them had seen Explorer and about 10 people raised their hands. The presenter appeared surprised but I was not.

Although SAP has been very heavily promoting the Explorer product for the last couple of years, the adoption of this newer search based query tool has been slow. There are many reasons for this but the one that stands out the most is, that as a Business Intelligence tool, it is limited.  While SAP BusinessObjects offers a number of Business Intelligence tools for different functions, the majority of customers prefer to pick just one or two for mass user consumption and they will tend to pick tools that can provide the widest range of functionality.

I recently conducted an ad-hoc survey of about 200 BusinessObjects customers in the U.S. encompassing small, medium and large companies and found that the top BI tools in use were Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Desktop Intelligence and Xcelsius. When looking at which tools they had most recently added in the last 3 years and were strategic for their future BI initiatives, it was Web Intelligence and Xcelsius.

Web Intelligence is seen as an end-to-end BI reporting and query analysis tool. It has both a web based version and a rich client version to be used off-line. It has good integration with Microsoft through Live Office and use of web parts and overall it has a rich array of functionality for self-service BI.

Xcelsius is probably the best BI data visualization and dashboard tool on the market today. It allows customized development of complete end-to-end BI solutions. It integrates with Microsoft, Adobe, Email, Google, Web as well as a host of other BI solutions. It also has a rich offering of add-on components and functionality to enable write back, alerts and mobile integration.

When we look at SAP Explorer, it is not really in the same category as Web Intelligence and Xcelsius. Explorer is a search web-based query tool for simple end-user ad-hoc analysis with limited reporting and customization ability. It can integrate with other BusinessObjects tools like Web Intelligence and Xcelsius and allows export to Excel but there is no real integration with other applications. It is a great solution for “one off” BI applications but not for end-to-end solutions.

SAP has been previewing the next potential edition of Explorer known as Exploration Views since the beginning of the year and this allows more end-user control and customization of the views.

Both Explorer and Exploration Views demonstrate very nicely and it is easy to get excited when seeing them but then the same could be said for Web Intelligence and Xcelsius.

I am sure we will continue to see more of Explorer but I see the future strength of the SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions remaining with Web Intelligence and Xcelsius for the foreseeable future.

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

IBIS 2010 Surfs and Serves Some Cool BI

By
Paul
Published: June 28, 2010Posted in: IBIS, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , , , , , , , , ,
IBIS 2010 Surfs and Serves Some Cool BI

Hands-on immersion training can be tough but when your classroom looks out on to the Pacific Ocean of Southern California and during the breaks you can walk out on to the balcony and watch surfers riding the waves, it’s not so bad.

IBIS 2010 Beach view

This year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) was just packed with high quality and in-depth boot camps and seminars covering Xcelsius, Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Data Services, BO XI 3.1 Administration and lots more. It was also located at the beautiful Ritz Carlton, Dana Point on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean which was the perfect remedy after a day of absorbing tons of knowledge.

The Welcome reception on Sunday night, entitled “Seeing Beyond Business Intelligence” was set in the Solutions Showcase area where sponsors demonstrated and discussed some of their latest business intelligence solutions.  I delivered the keynote the following morning on the same “Seeing Beyond” theme and highlighted some interesting business intelligence customer case studies.  The keynote on the Tuesday from Santiago Becerra, CEO of Mellmo, was quite fascinating as he took the audience through “the Evolution of Think” and cleverly demonstrated how putting fun into regular tasks can change people’s habits as well as their adoption of solutions. Showing Roambi, the latest business intelligence solution for the iPad, really brought the point home well.

The 2010 Best Xcelsius Awards demonstrated how far many companies have come in applying Xcelsius in very complex and powerful applications and inspired many others to go even further so I would watch out for next year’s awards.

I had the opportunity to meet with many people during the event and dive into some great discussions on both existing challenges in various BI implementations as well as future directions. In general, it appeared that most companies lag about 3 to 5 years behind the latest releases of SAP BusinessObjects and other BI solutions. Occasionally there is some critical new functionality that will compel a company to adopt a new release sooner but that tends to be the exception to the rule.  Many customers expressed that having reliability, stability and consistent performance are more important than most new functionality. Some of the newer solutions like Xcelsius dashboards and Roambi mobile business intelligence appear to circumnavigate this pattern since they can often be deployed and highly effective outside of the main business intelligence and production applications. A further big factor here is cost as many companies are more hesitant, due in part to the recent global recession, to spend large amounts of time and money on new software until they have conclusively proven a solid return on investment. For this reason incremental software purchases and pilot projects have become very popular in the BI space.

This was evident at IBIS as customers expressed a lot of interest in Xcelsius, XDM, Roambi, XWIS, GMaps, 360View, Version Manager and SAP BO EDGE solutions for very specific business issues and needs.

All in all, IBIS 2010 was a great BI gathering and information exchange and continues to grow in popularity. A couple of lucky attendees won iPads and a couple of not-so-lucky attendees dropped their phones in the ocean, but judging by the feedback everyone can’t wait to do it again.

Here are a few of the comments received back on IBIS 2010 :

“The IBIS conference was terrific this year.  I can’t wait to incorporate write-backs into our dashboards, and InfoBurst 2009 with dashboard bursting opens new doors for delivering customer information.  I also really enjoyed Aluchemie’s customer demo with all of their challenges they had to overcome!”

Kim Marshall, Waldinger Corporation

“I wanted to commend you and your team on the wonderful seminar.  My colleagues are very enthusiastic about their boot camp and the knowledgeable instructors they have met. You and your team have been wonderful throughout the past few days and everyone’s terrific attitudes have made the seminar a great success”

Melinda Dennis, Aluchemie

 

When asked, “What was the best part of the seminar for you?”, here are some of the responses :

“User Panel – excellent recognition of organizations with creative solutions”

“The class time. The first time I have ever been to a seminar where I was asked right from the beginning to reverse engineer an example”

“ The chance to talk and network with pros, find out what SAP doesn’t tell you about the product and get the best practices from people who have been in the trenches”

“…invaluable talking with other companies and knowledge sharing”

“… the workshops were excellent and very exercise intense so there was no boredom factor”

“Meeting with other users of the tools – It is a great way to get new ideas”

“The tips on real life best practices were extremely valuable – something that you cannot always get from other conferences”

“Size of the event led to good instruction and interaction”

“The training far surpasses any other training in the BI field. InfoSol has created a habitat for intensive training efforts at an economical price”

“The fact that I am learning things that are actually going to help me solve current problems – which also helps me sleep better at night”