( Geek2Live.net )

It feels like every time I write a blog post, I have to apologise for how long it’s been.  Once again, I’m sorry for not blogging for so long (this time it’s only been 6 months!).

So I wanted to give you all an update on what’s been happening in the last few months, as well as try and kick start my blogging career yet again.

One recent event was that I finally completed the certification exams for BOCP-BODI, that is, Data Integrator.  You may remember I posted about how difficult the first exam was – well the second was a lot harder, and I guess I was a little lucky with some of the questions.  I’ve found the certification exams are really a good measure for how well you know the software; if you’ve only been using it for a short time, don’t expect to be able to pass exams easily.  You only need to look at ‘the certification thread‘ on the BOB Forum to get an idea of how many people think they need help with certifications.

So I was very proud to be able to get the certification, and it means that I now have all four certifications that SAP BusinessObjects offer.  Hopefully they’ll release more in the near future.  I’d love to see a certification around Universe Design, as I feel that is much more important that the end reporting tool, like Web Intelligence.  Do you think there is a need for any other certifications?  Maybe Xcelsius? =)

Next up, I attended the 2009 Mastering Business Objects conference recently, held in Sydney Australia.  It was a two day conference, held at the Manly Hotel, on the beach.  Key highlights for me were meeting three great people, Timo Elliott, Dave Rathbun, and Jamie Oswald.  It was also great that most of the people I met were on either XI R2, or XI 3.x.  I did Twitter through most of the conference, so skip back a few pages and check out some of the live tweets at http://twitter.com/joshyf.

Myself with Dave Rathbun

Lastly for this post, I’d like to expand a little on a recent Proof of Concept that I undertook for a utility in Western Australia.  The scope was reasonably large given the time frame.  It was a three week engagement, with reporting required off SAP BW cubes and Oracle 10g databases, using the SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 full stack.  This included Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Polestar (soon to be called Explorer), Live Office, BI Widgets and more.  The POC was a great success, with a lot of value add being provided because of the quick development time with BusinessObjects.

The client especially loved how they could leverage the investment in the Universes with Polestar.  You have a universe, just index it and voila.  They also really appreciated the drill-through ability – we demonstrated drill through from Xcelsius into both Polestar and Web Intelligence.

That about wraps it up for this post.  If you like the content I put up, I’d love to hear any suggestions about how I could improve my blog posts.  Would you like more technical content, more walkthroughs?

- Josh

I sat the Web Intelligence XI 3.x Level Two exam last week and passed, which means I’m now a BusinessObjects Certified Professional in Web Intelligence XI 3.x.  This is a new certification from BusinessObjects and covers the new Web Intelligence features, as well as the old, and also some universe features.  I’ve noticed that recently BusinessObjects have stepped up the complexity of the exams and I’ve find both the Webi and Data Integrator exams to be more difficult than the older Crystal Reports and Admin exams.

However, I also noticed, especially during the Level 2 exam, several mistakes about the questions, including errors in Webi formulas.

I also recently got hold of a pre-release copy of Polestar XI 3.1.  I have to say, without having spent much time with it, I’m impressed with the improvements they’ve made to Polestar.  It feels more stable, and has some nice new features.

A word of warning however, during the install (I performed it on two different servers runnning XI 3.1), major problems occurred with the deployment of the new WAR files into Tomcat.  The Polestar install replaces, or creates, the following WAR files for:

• InfoViewApp
• InfoViewAppActions
• CmcApp
• CmcAppActions
• PlatformServices
• polestar
• polestar_help
• polestar_tutorial
• PolestarAppActions

However, Tomcat doesn’t successfully deploy these WAR files, and the above Tomcat directories, when viewed, are empty, so to the end-user, both InfoView and the CMC stop responding, and you can’t access them.  This can be resolved by undeploying, then redeploying, the affected WAR files.  I used the Lambda Probe (http://www.lambdaprobe.org/d/index.htm) to do this, but it can also be done by deleting the affected directories within the ‘webapps’ folder, and copying the above WAR files into the ‘webapps’ directory.  Tomcat should then deploy the WAR files automatically.

Apart from the issue described above (a major one BusinessObjects are now trying to work into a hot fix), Polestar seems stable and has some great new features.  When I get to play and experiment with it more, I will post a more detailed description.

EDIT:  I also forgot to mention that SAP BusinessObjects also released an online demo version of Polestar that anyone can play with.  Find it here (http://polestar.ondemand.com/polestar/).

- Josh

Hi all. Sorry again for the gap since my last post (at least it’s shorter than the last gap!).

Today I wanted to put down my thoughts about the new BO Enterprise XI 3.1, having recently implemented at a few sites, including a Dev/UAT/Prod 3-tier system.

So, what’s changed? And what did I like and dislike?

I do really like the new Web Intelligence Rich Client, and the zero-client Web Intelligence report panel (the Ajax-y one) is really coming along – in the next few releases it will be awesome! I did have some stability issues with the Rich Client during training sessions, however I put this down to slower, older machines. In day-to-day use I’ve found it fairly stable, however saving often doesn’t hurt! =)

I found the BusinessObjects documentation about the new LifeCycle Manager (released with XI 3.1) to be lacking. From the documentation, I could understand the process of creating a new promotion job, or how to version control a universe. What I couldn’t find is best practices – how should I use the promotion tool? All-in-one-go, or a folder of reports and a few universes at a time, or some other method?

I ended up designing and documenting my own best practice, however it still a little unclear as to how best to use it, down at the nitty gritty level.

Being able to track session usage (which was available in XI 3.0 also) is great, however I feel we Administrators really need the ability to kill a session as and when required – especially handy for those running BO Edge.

I also love the Widget and Live Office functionality, which I find great, however be warned – those of you running Vista x64 (like me) will find that Xcelsius visualisations can’t be added as a BI Widget. I currently have a case logged with SAP/BO to sort this out.

Until next time, Josh.