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. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 2”

Wednesday has dawned (bright and early, thanks to Alan Mayer who I am sharing a hotel room with 😛 ) and so I am able to post some thoughts before the day gets along too far. I watched only a portion of the general session this morning so I don’t really have any comments on it. The first track session that I plan to attend is on the text analysis tool that Business Objects purchased last year. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s essentially a tool that allows you to scan unstructured data like blog posts or forum topics 🙂 looking for information. One of the standard demonstrations shows how this tool can let you scan hundreds or thousands of emails that come into your customer service department and get an overall “feel” for the sentiment of those communications. It’s an interesting idea.

While I have time, some general thoughts and ramblings about the conference experience… Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 3 – Part 1”

I called this “Part Only” since I didn’t get to do a “part 1” today like I did yesterday. My presentation was this morning so I took the extra time this morning to complete my preparations for that, and then Alan Mayer (another Integra presenter) had his presentation this afternoon. As a result I have not managed to get to too many other presentations. I just got finished watching Tim Nightingale present on the benefits of migrating to XI 3.0, and there are some interesting new features that he called out as specific benefits. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 2 – Part Only”

This is my second post of the day from Berlin, Germany, where I am attending the SAPPHIRE conference. This is the first merged conference since SAP acquired Business Objects, and it has been interesting to see what is the same… as well as what’s different. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE Day 1 Part 2 (Wrap-up)”

So far I’ve been to the general session and one track session. I was wondering how the logistics were going to work with SAPPHIRE and the number of people here… it worked out fairly well. Once the main room filled out they sent overflow people to the “theaters” which are located throughout the conference facility. It was a good presentation; they showed some nice integration between SAP and various Business Objects (or other) products, and according to the presenters these are technologies that are available right here, right now. Meaning they’re not future integrations, they’re already here.

There was also plenty of new stuff (or so it seemed) for the SAP folks in the same presentation.

I also managed to track down one of the folks that has been responsible for the Insight conferences in the past and tried to confirm the information going around (or lack of information 😆 ) regarding the fall Insight conference. At this point he could not formally confirm anything, so I guess we’re still in the dark at least for a while. I know that there have been some announcements regarding a fall conference in Dallas, and we did talk about that. Essentially I got the “can neither confirm nor deny those allegations” sort of remarks. 🙂

The conference overall is huge, of course. But it’s relatively easy to find the Business Objects wing and hang out there. I’ll try to post more details about the track sessions and other information as I have time (and laptop battery) to do so.

One of the advantages of living in a big airline hub city like Dallas is that flight connections are generally good. Things start to fall apart for international flights… especially for some destinations. Berlin is one of those places, it seems. Continue reading “SAPPHIRE 2008 – Getting There is NOT Half the Fun…”

I got the acceptance notice a few days ago. I will be condensing my two-part “ninja” presentation into one part and presenting it at the combined SAPPHIRE / Business Objects conference in Berlin in May. At some point I will (eventually) get around to completing the write-up of the various sections here on my blog.

Hopefully before the next Insight Americas conference. 😆

There has been quite a bit of speculation as to what will happen with the user conferences that Business Objects has held. The questions have been answered, at least as far as the 2008 version of the European Insight conference is concerned. It will be held at the same time / same venue as the SAPPHIRE conference in Berlin, in May.

The call for speakers is up on the Business Objects web site (see Related Links). But what about the Americas conference? What I can do is speculate, is I don’t have any inside information. I suspect (and frankly I hope) that they will still hold a separate conference for the Americas Insight this year in the fall, as they have been doing for quite some time. I believe that the European Insight conference was combined with SAPPHIRE because it was convenient. The schedule is very close to what has been used for the past two European conferences (2006 – 2007) and extending SAPPHIRE (which is already a huge conference) to include another thousand or so participants was probably easier than trying to book and manage a separate venue.

But the Americas conference is much larger and has been running longer as a separate entity. I really hope that they keep it separate.

Related Links

• Call for Papers: European Insight 2008

I’m going to be recapping one of my “Tales of the Universe Ninja” presentations at the DFW User Group meeting tomorrow (February 19). If you’re in the area and never been to one of the user group meetings, please consider stopping by. Hope to see you there. 😎

Registration Link

I have (for now, at least) created a specific page for downloading conference presentations. I felt like this would make it easier to find them. If I post the presentations on a blog post, they will eventually roll off of the front page and I would imagine I would get plenty of questions about “where to download…” and so on.

Instead I have created a page just for hosting download links.

Conference Presentations

For now I have posted the Tales of the Ninja (part one and two) in zip format. The supplementary files (reports and universes and databases) are not yet available, and I am not sure when I will get the time to set them up properly. The first post related to this presentation is up and posted, and you can follow along with all of them using the Insight Americas 2007 category on the right-hand side menu.