This has to be my favorite tweet of this week from angad.singh :
@c821311 @paulhawking we have learnt one good thing that we never gonna forget "Share Knowledge To Gain Knowledge"
— Angad Singh (@tungals)
What a great concept to learn in school, something I wished to have learned many moons ago. I found this to be such an inspirational and motivating tweet. Kudos to Angad, Tony de Thomasis and Paul Hawking for this.
Hence, I've written these documents on the new BI4.1 System Configuration Wizard and new BI4.1 Universe Wizard. I've also written steps for an "in-place" install BI4.1 platform , and for Crystal Reports 2013 here and BI4.1 Explorer Install update here
I am not an installation expert or BI Administrator, but in my own way, I've tried to share knowledge to gain knowledge. Last September, I saw SAP's ashishc.morzaria in person who said something to the effect "we're going to make it easier for you to install BI4.1" and he was right.
I also hope you see the ease to install and upgrade to BI4.1. This doesn't replace the usual sizing, planning and deploying of your platform, but I believe SAP has made things a lot easier in BI4.1.
As a BI4.1 ramp-up customer we were fortunate to experience customer validation so once BI4.1 became available for ramp-up we were prepared to install the software the day it was released. During validation, SAP gave us three different builds, which included updates from the previous builds. We had an excellent, responsive SAP customer validation team, who always responded in 24 hours or less. It was interesting too to see how things progressed from the first build to the last build.
As an example, one new feature, while working in the first customer validation build, was not "intuitive" to me. In the second build, this was fixed. I found a small minor issue in the first customer validation build and this was corrected in the second build. I also couldn't get something to work in the one of the BI client tools - and received fast help from the SAP Customer Validation project team. They understood my feedback, and explained how it was currently working, and it would be easier for the universe designer in an upcoming SP.
So I felt SAP was extremely supportive of the customer validation process, and took my feedback seriously. In some cases it was implemented in future builds or it is coming in the future.
Source: SAP
The above screen shot shows where "CUV" which is customer validation testing occurs. You can see that six sprints have taken place already by the time the customer starts testing.
What is customer validation? Read more about it here in a previous blog. Last year we were also BI4 FP3 ramp-up customers, and had to provide daily reports to our ramp-up coach. It took us a while to download, install and plan the software. This year, thanks to customer validation, we were ready for ramp-up on day one.
If you decided to participate in customer validation, you do have to commit your own time and schedule, and create test cases and have regular calls with SAP. There is a commitment of work on your side. You cannot take the product to production with customer validation software. However for the ramp-up program, you work with SAP to outline a plan to go to production with the ramp-up software.
I'll share more of my experiences with BI4.1 more on SCN, so I too can "gain knowledge".
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