Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Yesterday I mentioned my first talk that I will be giving at the fall BusinessObjects conference this year. Brian Durning and I are going to compare and contrast Crystal and Web Intelligence. But that’s not all. In the session immediately following that one I will be giving a talk about change management for BusinessObjects universes.

Session Code: 804
Title: Don’t Lose Control: Change Management Strategies for Universe Designers
Day and Time: Tuesday, October 05, 2010, 2:45PM – 3:45PM

My final material is subject to change as I see how long each section gets, but here’s a brief overview of the areas I am considering covering.

• Impact of database changes
  What happens to my universe when my database changes? How can I address those issues in a way that causes the least impact on my reporting team?
• Impact of universe changes
  What happens to reports when I change my universe?
• How can I compare two versions of a universe to see what is changing?
  This is the big one… several years ago I started a script that allows me to check two different versions of a universe and see what is different. I have been using the script for a while now and it does most of what I need, but it isn’t complete. I plan to (hope to) get the code finished by October so I can distribute it at the conference, and of course here on my blog. The code will be released under the GNU GPL (open source license). Details of that license and what someone can (or cannot) do are found on the GNU GPL home page. I will demonstrate the code and how it works under various change scenarios during my presentation… assuming I get it all working the way I want it to, of course.

These were the ideas I had in mind when I submitted the abstract. Time will tell which of them make it into the final presentation. Anything that doesn’t make it will very likely show up here as blog posts.

At some point, anyway. I mean I only started working on my universe change script in 2007… 😉