Step-By-Step Guidelines to Formulate a High Availability Strategy for Your Business Objects Landscape

Review various architectural options for disaster recovery, such as leveraging local data centers or third-party vendors, and gauge which option would be best for your SAP BusinessObjects BI system. Determine the ideal level of deployment for your disaster recovery initiatives, based on your organization’s size and SAP BusinessObjects environment. Get tips for constructing a fault-tolerant SAP BusinessObjects enterprise architecture, such as using redundant components and expanded load balancing capabilities. Discover best practices for supporting high availability clusters for an SAP BusinessObjects BI landscape without going over budget.  Identify the appropriate mix of minimum availability to recovery need to ensure the ongoing availability of mission critical business analytics.  Realize the capability to create a recoverable and scalable environment even with limited resources. Throughout this presentation, we will explore the critical components of the SAP BusinessObjects landscape and common enterprise architecture components that can help ensure the availability of your environment.

Tips and Tricks for Deploying BI Web Services Within Your Web Intelligence Environment

Abstract: Attend this session to explore the BI Web services functionality within Web Intelligence 4.0 and learn how your BI environment might benefit from its use. Gain insight into the BI Web services enhancements made within SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence 4.0, such as no longer being required to use the rich client. Learn how Web Intelligence BI Web services can be deployed to create more sophisticated and customizable Xcelsius dashboards with cross-tabs and user-specific formulas. Receive technical guidelines for setting up input and output parameters, along with a relative URL. Explore options for leveraging BI Web services to source over 500 rows within a dashboard connection — without compromising performance. Walk through a detailed demonstration of how to create an Web Intelligence report, generate a BI Web service, and import the BI Web service into a dashboard.

Providing multi-level, “cubed” analysis capabilities within an Xcelsius dashboard

Abstract: Incorporating multiple levels of data analysis within an Xcelsius dashboard can be a challenge when pulling from a relational database. This session offers tips and tricks for jumping this hurdle, and providing “cubed” data for further drill-down and analysis within a dashboard — even when working off of a traditional relational database. Learn how to tweak your existing data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes to provide multidimensional aggregates to Xcelsius. Explore options for creating database views, universe-derived tables, and unions in Web Intelligence reports to serve as a data cube in your Xcelsius environment — all while maintaining row-level security. Walk through detailed demonstrations of each approach discussed to see firsthand how data cubes can be created in relational data sources to boost dashboard performance and usability in your organization.

Exploring Auditor Data

Abstract: Auditor data provides a great deal of insight into the behaviors of users in an SAP Business Objects XI deployment. However, in its current form, administrators can find it challenging in dealing with significant volumes of Auditor data. Rather than resorting to ETL or other denormalization techniques, learn how to leverage newer investments in SAP Explorer to create robust InfoSpaces for better activity intelligence for your SAP Business Objects XI deployment.

This file contains both the PDF version of this presentation as well as a .biar file including the universe and Explorer InfoSpaces demonstrated during this presentation. This universe is based on SP3 of BusinessObjects and Explorer 3.2.

UPDATE 10/26/2010: A new .biar file has been added to this .zip file that includes the universe on its own. Be sure to unpack this after the conference materials .biar. This includes the original universe, not modified for demo mode for conference.

The Center of the Universe

Abstract: SAP Business Objects is a product stack rich in features with a core capability centered around query and analysis, and augmented with technologies focused on data integration. In this presentation, get an introduction to the technology and explore the make up the reporting tools in the suite to identify what might make sense in a future deployment. Learn more about:

• How SAP Business Objects has developed an abstraction layer that promotes self-service reporting, known as the Universe
• How this Universe serves as the foundation for many of the products in the suite
• What to expect in constructing a new Universe
• Demonstrations for interactive and guided analysis
• Understand the key differences in the reporting technologies
• Learn why these tools matter to existing SAP deployments

Building BI Environments on a Budget

This presentation is actually several years old now. However, I think it is totally relevant today. Written as a case study while I was with my last full time employer, we discussed how to take a small deployment with a limited budget and shape it into a platform capable of fault tolerance without breaking the bank.