Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

We have to get this for the Business Objects conference! This was a lot of fun. They called it American Idol for Geeks. 😆

Day II of TechEd ended with an evening event that showcased contributor projects from all over. From what I understand of the process, it started with people submitting proposals (or perhaps even working code) to a selection committee. The selection committee members picked seven of the projects that sparked the most interest, and those project teams were invited to TechEd to share their work. Each team had six minutes to showcase their project and show off to the audience. As the moderator of the event remarked, “We show code here. If you use Powerpoint you’re booted off the stage.” Or words to that effect. 😆

The first presentation showed how the Canadian National Railroad does plant maintenance using a custom application with a touch-screen laptop with cellular modem connectivity. For the railroad, their “plant maintenance” is over a million miles of railroad track. It was an interesting application and I thought it was well done but since he went first, I think the applause was a bit less.

The next application showed an interface that allows folks to build interface forms without code. The funny part was that as the gentleman turned around he had one hand stuck in his belt and announced, “… and I will do it all with one hand tied behind my back!” That got a nice round of applause, and he proceeded through his demo (which did include some typing) and did indeed do the entire demonstration with one hand.

After his presentation the moderator started talking about SAP and folks working with data and as he was rambling on another gentleman from the audience walked up on stage. I apologize for the lousy picture quality (cell phone camera, what can you do) but here he is:

In case the picture is too fuzzy, that’s Brent Spiner from Star Trek TNG. He played “Data”. 😆

There was also a demo of the ESME project, which I have already talked about a bit. There were a couple of of demonstrations that showed iPhone integration. There was a project / database that was a reference of the extension points available in the current release of SAP. The winning project was an enterprise spell check. To be honest, the spell check application was nice, but it wasn’t my first choice.

I guess I wasn’t loud enough. 🙂