Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I called this “Part Only” since I didn’t get to do a “part 1” today like I did yesterday. My presentation was this morning so I took the extra time this morning to complete my preparations for that, and then Alan Mayer (another Integra presenter) had his presentation this afternoon. As a result I have not managed to get to too many other presentations. I just got finished watching Tim Nightingale present on the benefits of migrating to XI 3.0, and there are some interesting new features that he called out as specific benefits.

CMC Improvements

Tim showed some screen shots in his presentation with new (and much improved) CMC functionality. Part if it is architecture, but a good bit is just user interface improvements. It’s tough to make a web application work like a client application, but they’ve made some adjustments. For example you can multi-select with the shift or ctrl key now, and there is a context sensitive menu available on a right-mouse click.

They’ve also done away with “advanced” permissions and replaced it with custom access levels.

Finally, there is an embedded “query tool” that lets you traverse relationships from one CMC object (a user) to another (a report, universe, and so on) and get the report on the screen. Someone in the audience asked if that report could be exported, and the answer at the moment is that it cannot. Someone else asked if that could be addressed via the SDK, and the answer to that was “yes, because everything in CMC is written with the SDK” so that sounds promising.

Audit Improvements

This was a very interesting point for the talk that was a bit short on details. It’s one of the last improvements that is going to show up in Deski, and it’s related to auditing. Both of the offline clients (the Webi Rich Client as well as Deski) will capture audit information and cache it locally. On a periodic basis they will send that information up to the CMS where the data is processed and then stored. It wasn’t until after the talk was over that I considered asking a question about what level of detail was being collected… so I have no idea. 🙂 Something to learn.

Federated Repositories

Tim also talked about something called Federated Repositories. The concept here is that you can create a relationship between two repositories and schedule replication from one to the other. There are a few exceptions but for the most part anything (universes, reports, permissions) can be replicated. I used to work for a client that had a main office in one city and branch offices in other cities across the US. This feature would allow them to maintain only the home office repository as far as upgrades to universes and reports and those updates would be sent out to the branch offices on their requested schedule. Sounds very cool. 😎

Other XI 3.0 Questions

Tim also suggested that the rich client was going to be a huge benefit to report developers. He then went through a couple of scenarios which I have personal experience with. 🙂 For example, there is no “time out” setting on an offline client. With XIR2 it is possible to be working on a report and get called away for a meeting, a phone call, an urgent lunch… 😆 and by the time you return you have lost your work if you did not save. The offline client does away with that.

Someone asked “how much would it cost to migrate” and Tim corrected them. It’s not a “migration” to XI 3.0, it’s an upgrade. Then he proceeded to say that from a financial point of view he had no idea what the cost was. To be honest, I assumed that this should be an upgrade covered under maintenance. It never even occurred to me that there might be an additional cost for XI 3.0. (Note to self: find out what our partner rep says about this so our clients are not surprised.)

So that’s what I have to share for today. As it was yesterday, the weather is beautiful, the food is great, and there’s still more people wearing suits than I expected. 🙂 I did not bring my camera with me, so I won’t have pictures. I had a nice lunch with Werner (wdaen on BOB)… we got to talk about Nikon technology for a bit. Oh, and there were a few other BOB members that introduced themselves after my presentation was over. I always appreciate that, even if (with over 30,000 members now) I cannot possibly remember everyone. I love hearing that people are using and benefiting from BOB.