Recently I was asked to coach a team of 9 year-old boys in a recreational soccer league. I had retired from soccer coaching several years ago after my youngest daughter went to college, but the league said they would have to cancel this age group if they could not find ...
Read More »BusinessObjects Web Intelligence vs. PowerBI – The Truth from the Trenches Part 4
So, for Part 4 of this blog series, I would like to review how you can leverage BusinessObjects to enable and accelerate tools like PowerBI. There appears to be a general misunderstanding that organizations can save money by converting from BusinessObjects to PowerBI. Nothing could be further from the truth. ...
Read More »BusinessObjects Web Intelligence vs. PowerBI – The Truth from the Trenches Part 3
Well, this was supposed to only be a 2-part blog (link to Part 1 and Part 2 but there has been such an overwhelming interest and fantastic feedback on the first two parts, that I feel compelled to keep going since the topic is obviously of great interest to many. ...
Read More »BusinessObjects Web Intelligence vs. PowerBI – The Truth from the Trenches Part 2
In Part 1 of this blog, we reviewed the top 5 main differentiators between BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and PowerBI, as determined by 2 different independent BI consultants who have worked and continue to work extensively with both tools. In part 2, I asked the same two consultants to list their ...
Read More »BusinessObjects Web Intelligence vs. PowerBI – The Truth from the Trenches Part 1
One of the most frequent questions I have been asked lately is what do I think about PowerBI and can it really replace BusinessObjects? My stock answer has been along the lines of “PowerBI is a Business Intelligence solution from Microsoft oriented towards I.T. and, no, it cannot properly replace ...
Read More »Is InfoBurst Squirrel the Best Thing since Sliced Bread?
While on a recent trip to Egypt, I noticed some wall paintings in several of the tombs I visited showing a person sitting in front of an offering table with what looked like a bunch of thin, vertical oblong objects, tapered at the top, and tightly packed together. I took ...
Read More »BusinessObjects in the Cloud – No Big Rush and No Big Deal
While we have definitely seen an acceleration in organizations using or moving operational applications to the cloud, Business Intelligence has lagged behind. Today, the majority of BusinessObjects customers use the product on premise and that will not change for a while. Why? Well firstly, if the main data warehouses, repositories, ...
Read More »Tech Tip: Force Full Year with Time Dimension Features
Have you ever had the need to display a full year of data on a chart … even when you don’t have actual data to display? This is what we want to display: But this is what our data displays: We used to use complicated work arounds to handle this ...
Read More »The Bite-Size Future of Business Intelligence
One organization presenting at IBIS showed how they were using InfoBurst to automatically send text messages to people when critical drug shipments were delivered or delayed. This may appear to be more operational than BI in nature but the reports that were triggering these text messages was a BusinessObjects Web Intelligence report analyzing thousands of shipments.
Read More »Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3
The new and current SAP BusinessObjects release, BI 4.3, seems to come up in almost every conversation I have with customers these days so I thought I should blog about it. The last service pack of BI 4.2, SP09, was just released and will remain fully supported through to Dec. ...
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