Jul 28 2010
Change Management Strategies For Universe Developers
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… 😉
Dave,
I’m looking forward to this one – it sounds really interesting.
My session on “User License Auditing Using the .NET SDK” was also accepted. It’s an update of one that I did at the last actual Insight conference.
See you in Orlando!
-Dell
Will you cover / refer to LCM?
That’s a good question, Nick. We are not using it where I work so I don’t have direct experience with the tool. But it might not be a bad idea to check it out as an alternative. Thanks for the suggestion.
After further review, I have decided that I won’t be talking about LCM. There isn’t enough time to cover that and also cover what I want to talk about. The focus of my presentation will be on what the universe designer can do by himself (or herself) without relying on the BusinessObjects administrators. For the same reason I will not be covering any commercial (third party) products. The VBA script that I will be using will be provided free of charge and distributed under the GNU GPL software license.
Hi Dave,
We are having one table in our Datawarehouse. This table is going to change on daily basis in structure.I mean everyday a new column is added to this table. Now we are supposed to create an object for newly added column automatically. Can you please tell me how we can achieve this using external strategies in universe. We are using Business Objects XI 3.1.
Strategies don’t help with this because if my memory is correct they’re only applied when a table is imported, not when it has a structure refresh. If you need to have the new columns added automatically, you could look at writing a VBA script that would take care of this, but frankly this sounds like a really weird situation. What problem are they trying to solve by having a new column every day? 😕