Altek Solutions Business Intelligence Blog

In a previous post, I explained the basics of using the OpenDocument function in BusinessObjects to link directly to BI content. This article covers two of the more advanced topics: passing prompt values to OpenDocument and using the SDK to login behind the scenes.

Service Pack 3 for SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise was quietly released last week to the SAP Service Marketplace. It is available as both as a patch and a full install. All the associated documentation is available on the Help Portal. Here are some of the highlights from this release.

SAP BusinessObjects XI ships with a great feature known as OpenDocument. Simply put, OpenDocument allows you to generate a URL to link directly to any BI content in your BusinessObjects system. Using OpenDocument, you can pass specific parameters to a Crystal Report from your company’s intranet site, link from one WebIntelligence report to another, or jump to a WebIntelligence detail report from an Xcelsius dashboard. This powerful tool allows you to bypass complex webapps like InfoView and get right to the information you and your users need. Read on to find out how to use the OpenDocument function.

In the SAP BusinessObjects community, when someone talks about “AA” they don’t mean the meetings people attend, they are talking about a pretty cool function that is available in Designer. Aggregate Awareness or @aggregate_aware is a term that we use to describe the ability of a universe to utilize aggregate tables in a database. Using the function correctly can greatly improve the performance and user experience. This will be the first of two blogs and will talk about Aggregation and Summary tables. The second post will show how to implement Aggregate Awareness into a SAP BusinessObjects Universe.

Over the past eight years or so, we’ve developed a number of business intelligence extranets for our clients. One of our first solutions was developed on top of Business Objects 5.1, and we have touched virtually every subsequent release including Business Objects 6.1, Business Objects 6.5, Business Objects XI, and now…SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1. (We’ve even had the pleasure of updating several of these applications when the Business Objects SDKs were changed after the Crystal Decisions merger.)

When helping a client plan an extranet, there are a core set of guidelines that we always follow.

A little over a month on my Google Reader, I got an RSS Feed from the Business Object SAP Developer Network about an Xcelsius Challenge. The blog was put out by Jason Cao of SAP BusinessObjects and the challenge was to use community poll results in Xcelsius 2008 to showcase a developer’s skills. Not really interested, I marked it as read and moved along with my morning ritual of checking the happenings of the world. Later on in the day we had a company meeting to discuss upcoming projects and ideas for a new marketing campaign. One of the topics led us to chatting about creating some new demo dashboards for our website. This is when a light bulb went off in my head and I brought the challenge to the table. Long story short, the boss man thought it was a great idea and an easy way to get a demo dashboard done and put our name out on the SAP Community Network.

Back in March I posted “Five Reasons Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work In Some Organizations”. In that post, I listed some of the major concerns that I hear from potential clients when the subject of ad hoc reporting is broached. As promised, I will be addressing each of those concerns and showing how they can be overcome. We’ve already addressed “Our people aren’t smart enough to create their own reports.” Now let’s turn our attention to data, and look at “We need to massage the data first.”

I recently posted an article titled “Five Reasons Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work In Some Organizations”. In that article, I listed some of the major concerns that I hear from potential clients when the subject of ad hoc reporting is broached. As promised, I will be addressing each of those concerns and showing how they can be overcome. Today, we begin with the first one: “Our people aren’t smart enough to create their own reports”

Defining measures gets interesting because while they are tied to a high-level corporate goal, they also touch nearly every other aspect of the organization, making it a challenge sometimes to balance all of the competing interests. Plus, as soon as you start converting their behavior into numbers, people will simple adapt their behavior to have good numbers and may not deliver the overall results you had hoped.

Being a consultant is easy. You create a website, get some business cards, and hang out your shingle. Being a good consultant is much more difficult. I want to call attention to how critical it can be to choose the right partner for your SAP BusinessObjects implementation, migrations and development projects.