A "Worf" Wish for ASUG BI/EIM Sessions at ASUG Annual Conference

[TammyPowlas]

I wish I could be like my favorite Star Trek: Next Generation character Worf in the "Parallels" episode  so I could experience all these great sessions at ASUG Annual Conference.  In many different alternate "universes" I could be experiencing all these great sessions.  Please consider selecting many of these ASUG BI great sessions while you attend ASUG Annual Conference (co-located with SAPPHIRE NOW).

In the this ASUG BI brochure, we invite you to attend the education sessions selected by your ASUG BI volunteers.  We also introduce you to our great ASUG BI volunteer leadership team, putting our faces behind the people who volunteer on their own time for ASUG.  Additionally, not pictured in this brochure but working hard with us on Annual Conference were SAP Mentor Greg Myers and Sarang Deshpande. 

I want to thank the following ASUG volunteers for their hard work this year on ASUG Annual Conference: Yatkwai Kee, Greg Blair, George Peck, SAP Mentor Derek Loranca, SAP Mentor Greg Myers, Sarang Deshpande, Jeff Hughes, and Atul Patankar.  These individuals worked over the holidays to select abstracts, phone potential speakers to review abstracts, and spent the last month reviewing speaker presentations.  This was a very difficult job as we received over 340 abstracts and had to narrow them down to 48 (including Influence Councils). This was a tremendous team effort and I learned a great deal working with these individuals.

I want to thank all who submitted abstracts for ASUG Annual Conference.  I hope you consider submitting an abstract for an tammy.powlas3/blog/2011/05/06/time-for-teched-2011-talk--asug-call-for-speakers-for-sap-teched-is-open. 

One of our goals ASUG BI Volunteers this year was to educate our community on new BI / EIM 4.x releases.  As Derek Loranca said "we're not leaving any content behind" and we want our content to be "refreshing and relevant".   We have Roadmap sessions, HANA sessions, dashboarding sessions, tips and tricks sessions, BI Mobile, BW 730, new semantic layer, EIM how to upgrade to the new BI 4.0 and also real-life customer case stories from General Mills, St. Jude, Johns Hopkins, Trans Alta, Direct Relief (a non-profit), and Disney, just to name a few.


Another goal the community had this year was to expand our Influence Councils.  Attend these Influence sessions to get an update on the future direction of these products:

Influence Council: Enterprise Reporting; SAP Crystal Reports - with SAP's Coy Yonce and Reportapalooza winner and ASUG Volunteer Brian Durning


Influence Session for Best Practices for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) and SAP BusinessObjec...  with SAP's Uwe Palm and Uday Gupta, J.Crew

ASUG Influence: Semantic Layer Influence Council with ASUG Volunteer/SAP Mentor Derek Loranca and SAP's Pierpaolo Vezzosi


Influence SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Future with SAP's Scott Leaver and Francois Imberton


ASUG Influence: SAP BusinessObjects Analysis with ASUG Volunteer Joyce Butler and SAP's Alexander Peter

Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Influence Council with Kimberly Clark's Eric Leicht and SAP's Brian Wood.


A special note about the Influence Council for Best Practices for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) and SAP BusinessObjec... is that this is a mixed group of Small, Medium Businesses Volunteers with IT Business Intelligence report developers.  This is a joint effort of the ASUG BI Community and the ASUG Small Medium Enterprise Special Interest Group, discussing how to use Business Intelligence to solve real-world business problems.

An "honorable mention" Influence Session that I recommend attending is the Influence Council: SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications.  While this is not part of the ASUG BI Community, there are chapters in SAP Guidelines for Best-Built Applications that include Business Intelligence and Enteprise Information Management. 

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank SAP's Are you ready for ASUG / SAPPHIRE Conference ?.. I am..., who inspired the ASUG BI volunteers last Fall to "get moving" on our ASUG BI Influence councils. Ingo was right all along about the unique value that ASUG Influence Councils offer - influencing the future direction of SAP products and providing a voice of the customer to SAP.  Are you ready for ASUG / SAPPHIRE Conference ?.. I am... how Ingo is looking forward to the ASUG Annual Conference this year.

We look forward to seeing everyone at ASUG Annual Conference in about a week.