I would like to introduce my blog covering topics of SAP Analytics in Higher Education. My main goal for this endeavor is to solidify the SAP Higher Education and Research (HER) community on the topics of Business Warehouse (BW) and Business Intelligence (BI).
My first few couple postings may be basic, but I want to continue to build on this topic, get topic ideas from the community, and have this be useful to all customers and partners in Higher Education and Research.
Some of you may be regulars to SDN, BPX, and BOC, while some of you may not have fully explored these. There is incredibly valuable information within these websites, and if you haven’t taken the time, you should explore.
Quick summary of the SAP Community Network for those interested in Reporting:
SDN – This the SAP Developers Network, and contains mostly technical information about NetWeaver (including BW and BEx) and now some on BusinessObjects Enterprise, Crystal and Xcelsius. So, if you go into SDN, note the menu running down the left side, and the topics on Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management. Note that Business Explorer (BEx) info is stored under the Business Intelligence heading, and NetWeaver BW information is stored under Enterprise Information Management heading, then Enterprise Data Warehousing sub-heading. SDN contains news, blogs, and forums, and if I have technical questions about something, I will usually do a search on SDN before going anywhere.
BPX – This is the Business Process Expert community. Note that the menu on the left of BPX contains industries, not solutions. BPX is more industry-focused, and also can more functional and less technical than SDN. My blog will live within the Higher Education and Research area. There is also some useful content for Higher Ed in some of the other industries. For instance, many Higher Education institutions use Funds Management and Grants Management, and these are topics covered in the Public Sector industry of BPX. Each industry has its own blogs, wiki, and forums, and some industries are more active than others.
BOC – This is the BusinessObjects community, kind of like the BusinessObjects version of SDN. BOC contains good, detailed, and often technical information about BusinessObjects tools. It goes without saying that many BusinessObjects customers do not have any other SAP footprint, and so that is why this information is separate. This is incredibly useful for news, forums, blogs, and helpful documents about BusinessObjects if you are new to the topic or if you are an expert. Note that most integration topics between BusinessObjects and (NetWeaver) BW are covered in this SDN link and not in BOC.
Note that the BI and EIM navigation within SDN is relatively new (April 5, 2010), so see Have You Noticed the New SDN Navigation? for more.
The point of summarizing these SAP communities is also that this blog will not be replacing the information you get from them. I will hopefully cover functional topics regarding Analytics and BI that specifically relate to SAP higher education and research customers.
In the next posting, I hope to write a "Customer Profile", providing information about an SAP customer's (Northern Kentucky University) project using SLCM BW content.
If you are in (or interested in) the Higher Education and Research market, I hope you will read, comment, and contribute to this BPX community. Higher Education blogs can be found at this SDN link, and you can subscribe there.
