Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

The final speech has been spoken, the final demo has been given, and the final beer has been consumed. (What do you expect, the conference is in Germany… 😛 ) The beer was consumed by someone other than me (I don’t drink beer) but I sure enjoyed the company anyway. One of the things that I have found both this year and last is that with the smaller conference people are much more available. Obviously the full SAPPHIRE conference is very large (up around 9,000 people I was told) but the Business Objects portion of it remains smaller than the American Insight conferences. That means I get to talk to many more people that are both interesting and interested in what I might have to offer. Today was a great day for that.

As I mentioned earlier I watched a presentation on Publisher for XI 3.0. The main reason for doing that was to get access to the speaker, as he is also the project manager for the new Lifecycle Management product. This was a product / new feature mentioned yesterday in another talk and I was quite interested to see what they had to offer. So after the presentation was over and the after-presentation questions were addressed I was able to talk about the new product for about an hour or so.

Like I said, the people are much more accessible here. 🙂

I need to follow-up with an email and find out how much I can talk about here as far as features and so on before I post too much. I will be doing that shortly, and will post a resolution one way or another next week some time.

We also talked about migrations in general, and some of the issues that we’ve had at my current client. Having access to the product managers at the conferences is just awesome, and one of the best benefits to me as a consulting partner. It’s worth the price of admission.

They video taped the conference presentations this year, and the video is supposed to be posted soon. I believe I was told that you would have to register in order to be able to view the video but will confirm that before I post a link. The speaker ratings were not up yet (last year they were up the day after I spoke) and I suspect it’s because they’re still processing the video. It should be interesting… I would like to see what I look like when I am giving a presentation.

After the conference I spent some time touring Berlin with a new friend from San Antonio, then enjoyed a nice dinner followed by… wait for it… more ice cream. There is a Häagen-Dazs® ice cream parlor in one of the major restaurant areas in Berlin, and it just seems appropriate to eat there while visiting. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a very big fan of desserts. 😎

So this wraps up my coverage of the conference from Berlin. Once again I had a great time, got some great information, and hopefully delivered a great presentation to share with the attendees.