The SAP Insider Event in Las Vegas this past week covered BI, Mobile, IT / Admin, and Cloud.
See the tweetdoc for the twitter coverage during this event, #ADMIN2012.
See this tweetdoc for twitter coverage during this event, #BI2012 - note, there were so many tweets that tweetdoc could not capture them all.
See this tweetdoc for coverage during this event, #SAPCloud2012.
There was a Mobile2012 event too.
During this time, on Wednesday, 2/29, Timo Elliott conducted a tweet chat #SAPChat surrounding BI Best Practices with Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard. See this link for the SAP Chat tweetdoc.
Sessions Attended
I attended SAP Mentor Ingo Hilgefort’s session on "Selecting the Right BI Tool for BW Customers". Why is it important? Ingo says you want to select the right tool to increase customer satisfaction and make the business more self-service.
For those who could not attend this session (or see the screen shot above) Ingo gave this as an SCN webcast last week and you can watch the replay FEATURED EVENTS.
Some key takeaways from Ingo are that "your BI strategy starts with the requirements", "start by defining your requirements and your desired outcome" and not one tool meets all the requirements.
McKesson Case Study
I also attended Case Study: An Inside Look at McKesson’s Deployment of SAP BusinessObjects for Its Financial Dashboard and Analysis Requirements. Ross Wilson of McKesson presented at this session. He talked about the Financial Supply Chain Management project, the business needs and how they used Rapid Application Development to gather requirements quickly. He talked about how their technical architecture solution and showed sample dashboards. He talked about different approaches to operational and management KPIs. On a break, he told me he is presenting this again at Financials 2012 and possibly BI 2012 in Milan. I highly recommend this session.
I told Ross I liked how he introduced himself to each attendee prior to his session starting. He asked what their background was, what tools they were using, and what they hoped to get out of each session. That is something to consider for future speakers. His session was so popular it was repeated later in the day.
BusinessObjects SDK Roadmap
Terry Penner, SAP, presented this, reviewing what is coming in the BI SDK's for Feature Pack 3. Overall, I liked his message of "select the right BI tool, then the right SDK". Analysis Office SDK is accessible through Office VBA, and Crystal Reports for Enterprise Restful services APIs in feature pack 3. He translated the marketing message of "Insight to Action" to mean that Report to Report Interface coming for Crystal and SBOP Dashboard.
Ask the Experts
I attended this session both nights, the first night with Dave Rathbun and the second night with Ingo Hilgefort. I was able to explain how we deployed Crystal Reports 2011 with ERP and I recommended to several of the attendees how they should take advantage of the FREE BI4 tutorials at sap.com/learnbi
It was here where I also spoke to fellow ASUG volunteer Lee Lewis and I got to meet SAP's Matthias Wild and Jens Koerner. Both nights we stayed past the allotted time, with lights flickering indicated that we should leave.
Ingo Hilgefort BusinessObjects Analysis LIVE Demo
Ingo did a live demo of the BusinessObjects Analysis tool set, showing how the toolset is context aware, has full hierarchy support, the pause refresh feature, live data inside PowerPoint. He answered questions about BEx performance - does Analysis have the same performance as BEx? Yes. He reviewed the different personas using Analysis.
Some of his favorite features include the focused analysis in Analysis OLAP. He discussed the new premium successor to Web Application Designer, Analysis Edition for Application Design, which is planned beta in June, planned ramp up Q4.
What did I Miss?
Having worked on Solution Manager, I am sorry I didn't attend any of those sessions. SAP Insider also had several hands-on sessions, and those were very popular.
While I did see SAP Mentor Rich Heilman, Timo Elliott, Kelly Harris, neither they nor I had time to chat. They days simply flew by.
Finally, the MGM Grand elevators played some great music I hadn't heard in years, such as "Groove Line" - leave your worries behind.
