Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I had an opportunity to meet the head of ASUG at lunch today. It was a good lunch (I’ve already posted about the food 🙂 ) as we got a chance to discuss some of the initial feedback on BOB regarding how user groups are going to be managed under SAP. I posted a few notes about it here already. In a nutshell there are some potentially exciting things that will be coming in the next year or two for the regional user groups. But of course that’s not all that’s going on today.

I am watching a presentation on Publisher from XI 3.0 right now, and it looks impressive. (Seriously, I am typing this during the presentation. That’s probably rude, but I am doing it anyway, taking advantage of the power connection on the table because of my laptop battery.)

They’ve added a lot of performance features including parallel bursting. In one case study they sent out a million+ publications with a single job, using parallel processing on a 16 cpu box. It was a big box, of course, but being able to send out that sort of volume is impressive. The gentleman giving the presentation is also responsible for the new product Lifecycle Manager, so I hope to talk to him after the presentation is done.

Back to Publisher… I’ve worked with it some, and I do remember being quite frustrated about the lack of performance. We resorted to VBA code for one client to get a “run-once” functionality, and that’s in the product now. We used a 3rd party PDF merge process in order to take multiple PDF files and create a single statement; that, too, is built into the product now. Our process was designed to be restartable on error… that too, is built into the product. Are you starting to see a theme here? 🙂 Basically the presenter started out admitting that there were issues with prior releases, but he states that with Publisher XI 3.0, and I quote:

We finally got it right

It looks like that may be the case from the feature list and the demo. I hope to be able to play with it soon. 8)