Pre-meeting networking
After sneaking a great lunch in before the meting with Dallas Marks, it was, as always, great to show up and catch up with some other old friends. Thanks, as always, to Sense Corp for hosting.
What's New in 4.0 and Mobile BI - David Petranek, SAP
There have been so many advances in the mobile pieces of BI4 I don't know how to keep up. I think one thing largely overlooked in talking about the value of the newest almost release of Business Intelligence from SAP is the shared developer experience between Crystal, Webi, and even Dashboards (Xcelsius). This means you no longer need a Crystal guy and a Webi girl and a Dashboard person, you can just have BI people who select the right tool based on the business need and not based on which developer has the most bandwidth. Also, the new Launchpad really let's folks get at the content they want regardless of it's source, which is really most of the point of a BI portal anyway.jail give David a ton of credit for giving probably the most complete and informative BI4 presentation I've seen. Great mix of high level and in-the-weeds type stuff.
Dallas has been speaking about BusinessObjects since, well, probably since before I was working with BusinessObjects. Today was a great example of why. We really need to get this bit done as a recorded webinar either on SCN or ASUG. He answered all of the questions I had about Explorer security but that took me forever to figure out on my own, and he really ran through everything a BI team needs to know to get this up and running. He literally covered history, architecture, deployment, security, organizational impact, best practices, information space management and creation, scheduling, administration, and he did it all in 45 minutes without being rushed..
I've known Chris for a while ago. He's pretty tall, but more importantly, he knows the BO stack from top to bottom and also has his hands into Agile BI Methodology. This particular presentation largely centered on using Web Intelligence Rich Client and BI Services to feed Xcelsius dashboards. (If I didn't know any better, I'd think this agenda was handpicked by me to help inform me on issues I'm working on at my day job. Being on the committee has it's perks.) Chris always does a good job dropping to the lowest level of detail while making sure to explain everything at a level that even people new to the tool can follow along. This would also make a great ASUG or SCN webinar.
Happy Hour
C'mon people, I NEVER write about the happy hour. Just my thing. I will say this was our best BOUG session in a while from a technical standpoint, and I'd heartily recommend inviting any of these presenters to your local user group meeting. Until next time (which should be tomorrow) this was my Snap Judgment.
