Leaving Las Vegas #SAPTechEd – Time to Learn at #ASUG Pre-Conference Session

As I write this I am leaving Las Vegas.  There is that saying “SAP TechEd, it is not about marketing – it is about what the product can do”.  This is the main reason I like this event.

First up was the ASUG hands-on pre-conference session with SAP’s Ingo Hilgefort .  This was sold out months ago.  Here attendees learned that there is “no silver bullet with any one tool, each tool serves a unique purpose”.  Having a “BI inside your ERP system” and using transient providers was discussed. When you are reporting off of BW with the BI tools, you want to “talk to the query, not the cube”, for security reasons and to reuse calculated key figures and restricted key figures.  We learned that only the Analysis tools support zero suppression from BEx.

So what is going on with BEx Analyzer?  We learned that it is in maintenance mode.   We reviewed why it is important to use query stripping in Web Intelligence to only bring back the data needed.

On this day too, we had the “world premiere” of Design Studio as a hands-on session, which is planned to be generally available in November.  During the keynote, SAP’s Michael Reh said they had 400 active Beta registrations for Design Studio.  The beta program was so successful there is no ramp-up for this product.  The SAP TechEd InnoJam winners used Design Studio in their winning application.

In response to a question, we learned that Analysis Office does not replace Live Office.  There are 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Analysis Office and it depends on if you have a 32 bit or 64 bit version of Office, not your operating system.

But what did the attendees of this ASUG Pre-conference think?  This picture above says it all.

If you missed Tech Ed this past week, never fear – there are several online recordings, including this one on BW Workspaces with Analysis Office

Save the date for SAP Tech Ed Las Vegas 2013 October 21-25.

*Photos are courtesy of the SAP TechEd photographer – thank you