Altek Solutions Business Intelligence Blog

Data Services 4.0 is currently in ramp-up with SAP. Just like in the new BusinessObjects version, there are a lot of changes to be seen here. Overall it is much more tightly integrated with the BusinessObjects platform, providing a much more streamlined and consistent user experience. Here’s a taste of what’s new.

Altek Solutions is a leading provider of end-to-end business intelligence and data management solutions. We are currently looking for experienced, full-time SAP BusinessObjects developers to add to our consulting staff. Your initial project would involve the analysis, design, development and maintenance of SAP BusinessObjects universes and reports for an ongoing effort we have with an existing client.

As an SAP BusinessObjects Channel Partner, we have been given the privilege and opportunity to engage in a pre-release version of the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise 4.0 product stack for evaluation purposes. This is a very exciting time for us here at Altek Solutions as our Center of Excellence has already installed the software and is in the process of analyzing and evaluating the new features that 4.0 has to offer. Be sure to come back often to view any news that we put out regarding the 4.0 release, but to start here are a few things that stick out from what we have found thus far!

Throughout the lifecycle of a popular product or organization, you can expect names to evolve and change. Since the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP, however, this has become a much bigger problem. SAP likes to use “descriptive names” for their products, so they pick names that generically describe what the product does. It seems like they went down that path for some products (i.e. Xcelsius) but reverted back to the original product names for others (i.e. Web Intelligence). What we’re left with is a collection of names that may or may not mean something to us.

All of us here at Altek Solutions would like to wish you and yours a very joyous holiday season and a happy new year. Without your dedication and trust in our offerings, we would not be able to see continually increased numbers in view counts from month to month. As we move into next year, we hope to continue to provide quality information to all of our followers.

SAP BusinessObjects has put out another Fix Pack for Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008). I was able to access the documentation on fixed issues and the release notes and have attached them to the bottom of the page. The biggest fix that I see is the handling of child dashboards and their failure to load at time. For all the fixes check out the list below and the associated documentation.

Sharing information from parent dashboards to child dashboards is a topic that has been gaining steam over the past 6 months and is a great way of increasing performance and enhancing your end users experience. What we are going to cover in this post is how to incorporate child dashboards in parent by accessing the child from InfoView using built in functionality called document download. Unfortunately there is not a whole lot of documentation of what document download is and how it is used so here is how I understand it to work. Document download works along the same lines as OpenDocument but the difference lies in that OpenDocument will pull in a resource that is inside the OpenDocument frame. Document download on the other hand will only pull the resource itself. This post will give you the basics on how to implement this functionality into Xcelsius.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what it takes to be a great business intelligence consultant.  Now it’s time to turn the tables a bit, and talk about what it takes to be a great client. Successful implementation of a BI project is based on a partnership between the consultants and the client, so [...]

There seems to be a theme with all the blog series that I have created over the past year and it is something that I would love to fix but really can’t control. I am not trying to make excuses but over the past month and a half I have been swamped with multiple projects and have not been able to add any more entries into our CDD Tips and Tricks series. But over the next 2 months, I am going to try and make a conscious effort to wrap up our first season of the CDD and move on towards a new one starting the spring of next year that will hopefully include some vlogs! If anyone has any ideas they would like to throw at me, feel free to reach out and I will look into getting it put on our list of tips for an upcoming episode. Lets get started on the topic at hand though and look at how to create custom navigation using label based menus and push buttons.

In a previous post (If Google is Your Consultant’s Best Friend…RUN!) I mentioned a case where a “consultant” was hired for a project they obviously had no clue about how to deliver.  Certainly a case of the project team bringing in the wrong resource. Along those lines, I’m often asked by people just starting their [...]