Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I am beginning to get an idea of what things would be like if BOB had over a million members. 😆 The “Community Day” is the pre-cursor to the full TechEd event, and the entire day is built around community members. The opening session was … interesting. They gave out harmonicas to everyone entering the room, and at one point we were all asked to join in a symphony of sorts. You can imagine the noise. 😉

One of the other interesting details they shared was something called the Food for Points program. They revealed that they had just gone over the 2.5 million points level, which means that SAP will donate one hundred thousand euros to a program that feeds school children in different countries around the world. It seems that in earlier years that SDN (SAP Developer Network) would recognize outstanding contributors by sending them t-shirts. This year instead of wasting the money on shirts and postage they are sending the money to an international food fund. I think that’s an awesome decision, and it got quite a round of applause when the audience was told that they had just exceeded the 2.5 million point mark required for the minimum contribution. There are additional contribution amounts that will be made at 3M and 3.5M points if attained before the end of the year.

As a very basic level, from what I can tell anyway, points are a bit like the “Topic Points” system we have on BOB. If people ask questions and get good answers, they can award points. The total points is an indication of just how active the community is. The more questions are asked and answered, the more points are generated. The number of questions answered is also increasing the value of the community for other members as well. It’s a “win” all the way around.

They had one slide where the recognized the newest members of the SAP Mentor program, so I got to stand up and wave. I was introduced as the founder of BOB; I wonder how may people here know what BOB is. 🙂

We’re just about to break for lunch. I have been attending a presentation from Ingo Hilgefort, one of the product managers for Business Objects. We’re going to be setting up an Xcelsius dashboard that uses SAP data (naturally, this is an SAP conference). I have not had a chance to work with Xcelsius much (I still have to think about how to spell it!) so this will be fun for me.

I’ve taken a quick peek at the activities for the rest of the week… it looks like a lot of fun, and a lot of information. I have so far not figured out if there is a conference access password for the convention center wireless network (like there was in Berlin) so I am blogging from the class laptop. I don’t know if I will be able to keep up the “live” blogs for the remainder of the day, but I am working on that. It’s just a technology issue… and I should be able to solve that. 8)