Products

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” ...

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. This year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) was ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A second day in Paris and another day full of meetings. The second meeting is over lunch at a classic French restaurant situated next to the famous Opera with elaborately painted ceilings and a platoon of waiting staff for every table.  Each of the menu choices requires a paragraph of ...

I arrive in Paris in the middle of a train strike and I am expecting the worst but as I step off the Eurostar train from London (not on strike – different company) and jump on the Metro (not on strike – different company), I notice nothing unusual.  I was ...