David Taylors Business Intelligence Blog

The associated press just announced that the SAP $6.8 billion purchase of Business Objects has cleared their review. They said that the deal, “would not significantly impede effective competition” in the 27-nation EU… this is on top of the top given by the US which I wrote about earlier.

Click here to read the full Associated Press Announcement

It will be interesting to see how things play out now. Here are a list of the recent large BI aquisitions:

• Oracle buys Hyperion
• SAP buys Business Objects
• IBM buys Cognos

It so funny how things work out. At Business Objects we had the “annual” merger rumors, which have occurred every year for the past 3 years. Who would it be? IBM? Microsoft? Oracle? SAP? HP? even Google? Google – Hmmm that was an interesting one.

I never really thought SAP would buy Business Objects. You see, I’m an SAP Champion, which means that I get involved in a lot of the Business Objects deals around SAP in my region. I’ve always perceived that SAP had a strong “we can build it better” mentality and therefore would never buy us. In addition, we would be so expensive. Since they already had a large set of their own BI tools, would they ever admit that they need something that worked with non-SAP data? They had only made very small acquisitions in the past. It seemed pretty unlikely.

Well, obviously things changed, because they forked over $6.8 billion… that’s a tidy little bit. We were pretty excited when we passed the $1B revenue/year mark at the end of 2006…. (meaning our revenues were more than $250K/quarter). Well in looking over SAP’s financials, they make $1B/quarter. Wow! Business Objects is big for a “BI” company, but we would have a long way to go on our own to reach their size. They say the 2nd billion is always the hardest.

I’d love to share my thoughts about what might happen or what should happen, but I don’t that it would be very valuable to all of you… and besides, they say it’s illegal to talk about the future or express opinions and what could be/should be since we’re still, officially two companies.

Still, I have to say, since joining Crystal Decisions in 2001, it’s been a really fun ride. I came from a smallish company of 120 employees and soon I’ll be working for one of the three largest software companies in the world. This is awesome. God is good.

Deploying BusinessObjects XI on remote web servers just go a whole lot easier!

BusinessObjects has always been easy to install when you take the default settings and do a single server installation, but what about when you are trying to install BusinessObjects across a number of different web servers. As Murphy’s law dictates, the documentation never seems to talk about your specific scenario. Am I right?

Welcome wdeploy!

Well, BusinessObjects has developed a really nice little deployment helper program called wdeploy. This is not available through the standard software download site, but rather is available from technical support:

Download wdeploy here

The documentation is located here:

Download wdeploy documentation here

wdeploy Enhances Performance

Many customers choose to implement an external web server in front of the BI stack for one or many of the following reasons:

• They wish to implement a DMZ
• They wish for the web server to serve up static web content only, thereby removing this load from the web app server
• They wish to offload the SSL work from Web App Servers

The key capabilities of wdeploy is that is loads the right resources on the right server. It can take the standard desktop.war file produced during installation of BusinessObjects and break it apart into two smaller WARs. One WAR just containing the static content and the other WAR containing the dynamic JSPs and Servlets.

I just read a great article that I agree with wholeheartedly. John Myers writes a regular blog on BEYE website. Unfortunately he doesn’t provide a trackback, so I can’t easily reference his original posting, but here’s what he says:

The next time that I hear about how IT departments want to drive to a standard, I will forward to them either this Elana Varon interview with Gary Hamel, famed business strategist, or just send them in the direction of his new book.

Hamel rightly points out in Varon’s interview that too many IT organizations are moving toward a best practices model rather than a best for business model:

“So many companies are now running the same software platforms, whether Oracle or SAP or whatever. Increasingly, we rely on the same handful of off shoring companies or IT service companies. There are a whole lot of things that IT folks have to do to keep up as part of the IT arms race, but in the end the only thing that’s really going to make a difference is whether you’re using IT in a unique way to do unique things where you don’t find any other benchmarks. If you ask the average CIO what percentage of his total budget and headcount is devoted to things that are unique to his industry, I think it’s probably too small a number.”

For every opportunity to optimize business operations, those IT departments are taking one step away from maximizing the unique attributes of the business. In telecommunications, management needs to focus their strategies, and budgets, on what will break them from the pack of the “established” telecos (ie AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Telefonica) and position them for a unique position or offering that will provide competitive advantage.

Since I work for Business Objects, it’s my job to work with companies and help them to use Business Intelligence as a competitive advantage. The problem is that so often it’s the IT organizations that try and keep you at arms length. They treat you as “a vendor” and not as a strategic partner… and yet in my experience there are two key qualities which set companies apart:

1. The Acknowledgment of BI as a technology to provide strategic, competitive advantages
2. The mandate from upper management to realize those advantages

What companies so often don’t understand is that BI can be a GREAT vehicle for that competitive advantage. The marketing departments of every successful software company have articles about ROI, increased revenues, increased efficiencies, decreased costs, ROI, etc.

But what about long-standing competitive advantage?

This is especially critical in industries such as telecommunications where competition is fierce and we continue to see major innovations as these companies uses technology to set itself apart, but one of the biggest challenges is to know where you are today and were do you go from here? It’s amazing to me how many companies lack a comprehensive view of key corporate metrics. If you don’t know where you are, how are you supposed to know where to go next?

Do you know the answers to some of these key questions about your customers and products?

• Should we focus on customer attrition or on customers who are spending less that they did previously?
• How do targets affect discounts?
• Which products are discounted the most? Why?
• What is the spending profile of my different customer segments?
• How much revenue came from new vs. existing customers?
• Who is making the most revenue from the least number of sales?
• What percentage of our customers deliver the top 25% of our revenue?
• Why are customers moving from one segment to another?
• How soon after the sale do customers call for help? What products do they need help with?
• Did customers receive adequate training and information about the product?

Business Intelligence provides you a framework to answer all these types of questions. Most organizations have this data somewhere in their enterprise data warehouse or operational system but either don’t see the value or have yet to make the appropriate investments and having the data but not turning that data into intelligent information, is like burning money.

I often get asked about getting the most out of BusinessObjects, so I thought I would take a few moments to mention an often overlooked factor is being successful with BusinessObjects.

What do companies need to do to make their investment in BusinessObjects pay off?

There are the obvious things such as creating a Center of Excellence around BusinessObjects and enforce adherence to those standard processes, procedures and development standards. There is the need for education to make sure that people know how to use the tool and getting help from consultants when appropriate… but there is one additional factor that I think is critical to success.

Embrace the SDK. Yes, that’s right – leverage the BusinessObjects SDK to allow the software to work for you in a way that makes everyone’s lives easier. You can always develop best practices, processes and procedures on paper, but the best way to enforce them is by building SDK support around those standards.

AT&T Embraced the SDK

One outstanding example is at AT&T. They needed to be able to support over 50,000 end users (and this number continues to grow) and hundreds of report developers with minimal support staff. The team realized that the only way to make sure that the system enforced those standards was to leverage the SDK.

Their business requirements included:

• Create an application for the migration, tracking, and versioning of Crystal Reports between Development, QC, and Production.
• Assign roles to users to perform different functions in the Report Development Life Cycle
• Enforce AT&T standards such as exact placement of logos, headers, and footers
• Historical versioning to go back to previous versions should a bug be introduced. Used as information on how many times the report has been checked-in, migrated to QC, and migrated to Production.
• Results in a clean easily maintainable system

This lead them to the following technical requirements:

• Track the creation and modifications of reports through a checkin/check-out process in the development environment
  • Developers can only save reports to their own user folder in Enterprise preventing any changes in naming or multiple versions.
• Roles assigned to the Users
  • Developer: New Reports, Check-In, Check-Out, Transport to QC
  • Tester: Approving / Denying Reports, Documenting Defects
  • Release/Change Manager: Approving migrations to Production when all necessary items have been accounted for
  • Administrator: Full control of the tool, adding users to above roles
• Prevent any modifications to the reports that could be introduced through the migration between environments in the Crystal Reports Designer.
  • Automatically set the dB location on reports through the RDC
  • Saves the report to the exact location with correct naming
  • No accidental clicking/moving/changing/deleting of objects on reports
• Provide specific templates of reports for a developer to use which contain the standard AT&T Logo, headers, footers, font (size, face, style) and location already set for new report development

As you can see, there were some pretty extensive requirements and in order to achieve these goals, either one of two things would have to happen.

1. Nag Business Objects until they capitulate and put these capabilities into the software natively.
2. Embrace the SDK and build it yourself.

The team at AT&T did the later with remarkable results which they shared with other BusinessObjects Users during the INSIGHT 2006 conference. Click here to download the entire presentation.

Now, one could argue that Business Objects should provide this capability out of the box, but the reality is that no BI software company will be able to provide an Enterprise Business Intelligence solution that will meet all of your requirements 100%. What IS important is that the solution provide an extensive SDK which will allow you to customize your environment to meet your companies needs.

When talking with companies about BusinessObjects I like to talk about the rich history that BusinessObjects has around SDK and developer support. Our communities might not be as reach as Microsoft or BEA, but we have recently made some great strides forward with our launch of the Diamond Developer Site.

Another great resource is a book written by Carl Ganz, Jr. called Pro Crystal Enterprise/Business Objects XI Programming. This is an excellent resource for learning about software development – specifically for the BOE platform. For me, the only problem with the book is that I wish it included samples written in Java; however all the samples are very clearly detailed and Carl does a great job at stepping the developer through the core components of the SDK. I highly recommend this book.

As I come across good sample of the SDK in action I will make these available on my blog. I also recommend that you begin to troll through many of the samples on the Diamond Developer Site.

I truly believe that the best and most successful Enterprise Business Intelligence implementations take advantage of the SDK to customize the software works so that it works more efficiently for the organization and ultimately for the administrators and end-users. In the meantime, we’ll continue to push the development team at Business Objects to add more and more features into the products.

Happy SDKing.

Bringing Together HTML Controls and Crystal Reports

Every once in a while I get a chance to present in a forum or user group and show some new amazing capabilities in the product suite. Last year I had the chance to demonstrate WebElements. WebElements is a collection of Crystal functions which generate HTML.

An easy to use library of functions for Crystal Reports designers:

• Designed by a report designer for report designers
• Embed different kinds of controls for report consumers
• Easily distributed as an .rpt file to other report designers
• Small in size, less than 60k unzipped
• Automated installation
• Expandable and customizable and code can be shared

Since Microsoft Reporting Services provides easy to use drop-down parameters, more and more customers are asking for the ability to embed web controls into their Crystal Reports. Now with Webelements we can add radio buttons, list boxes, drop-down selectors, action buttons, etc. In fact, Jamie Wiseman, the original creator of WebElements has a lot of great samples you can download from the Business Objects Diamond Developer website.

WebElements Online Presentation

Click on the picture below to access my WebElements presentation:

I’d love to hear your feedback on WebElements.

If you’ve not seen the latest version of Crystal Reports, then you might want to see what you are missing. The latest version of Crystal Reports (v13) is called Crystal Reports 2008 and started shipping earlier this month. Although there are a lot of great features in the product including:

• New Parameter Panel with optional Parameters
• Long awaited Cross-tab Enhancements
• Better Page Control for Web-based Reporting
• Salesforce.com and CrystalReports.com Integration
  

  

Favorite Feature in Crystal Reports 2008

Probably my favorite feature is the new Xcelsius and Flex Integration. It’s so cool. You can now take controls that are built using Xcelsius and the Adobe Flex environment and embed them directly into Crystal Reports. In fact as Xcelsius expands it’s support for Flex, we will be able to embed better looking, more dynamic and more powerful visualizations into Crystal Reports.

I have included a couple of sample Xcelsius pie charts that you can embed into a Crystal Report and then link to data using Crystal Reports 2008. You can download them here. This sample includes two Xcelsius swf objects and three Crystal Reports.

My Other Favorite Feature

Starting with version 9 of Crystal Reports, the software took on an annoying new habit. When you wanted to change the font or the font size, the cursor would insert itself into the field instead of highlighting the entire field, so when you started typing, it would INSERT a new value instead of allowing you to type over the value.

This viewlet will show you what I mean.

Well, this has been fixed in Crystal Reports 2008! I shared my feelings with the guys in development and they took care of it for me. Now when you change the font or font size it works just like MS Word or MS Excel. This is fantastic! Sometimes it’s the little things in life that give you the biggest joy.

Keep up the hard work guys!!

Just moments ago regulators approved the merger between the two companies.

Here is the release from the associated press posted to Forbes:

U.S. antitrust regulators approved SAP AG’s $6.8 billion purchase of Paris-based software company Business Objects SA, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday.

Read More

I psyched about the whole Business Objects/SAP merger. I think it’s the perfect next step. Business Objects will be able to retain it’s independent status while providing the best Business Intelligence solutions in the marketplace today. I never thought I’d work for a company that delivers tools a ubiquitous as Crystal Reports and as global as SAP R3/BW.

Can I Get Row-level Security with WebIntelligence and Still Avoid a Document Refresh?

Sure!

As a follow-up to my post yesterday I wanted to step back and say that normally you do want to handle row-level security from within the semantic layer. The problem is that you can’t get the benefit of the speed of data that comes from historical instances without requiring each user to run the report for themselves.

I did discover that you can provide the same type of security within WebIntelligence. WebIntelligence also has a function which also returns the name of the current user. The function is CurrentUser.

1. The first thing I need to do is build the semantic layer to include my security table.

2. Next, create a new variable which returns a 1 or 0 based on whether or not the user should see the data or not.

=If(CurrentUser()=”Administrator” Or CurrentUser() = [Username];1;0)

3. Create the report and apply the filter to the entire report or to the appropriate data block.

4. Here is what Ron’s sees, when he looks at an historical instance of the WebIntelligence report.

Notice that the Data Summary on the left hand side shows me that there were 71 records but even so, the restricted user ron is only allowed to 3 of the 71.

The beauty of this is that when I look at this data via BusinessObjects LiveOffice, I will see exactly the same restrictions enforced.

REMEMBER: Normally if you need row-level security, then just apply it to the universe. IF, however, you need row-level security on historical instances without requiring them to be refreshed, then use this great trick.

Row-level Security on Scheduled Instances Without the Use of Business Views

When I realized that I could get row-level security on scheduled instances without using Business Views I thought, I have to share this with everyone. When you schedule a report, the engine retrieves all the data based on the credentials of the user running the report. If I now want to get row-level security, I must apply security within the report at “format time” or view time. In other words, I must apply the security to the formatting of the report.

The great thing about this is that it not only applies to viewing reports, but also to accessing those view reports through other tools such as Live Office.
Situation: Allow an administrative user to run a report for all users and then apply row-level security at view time but do not leverage Business Views.

1. Make sure you have some type of method for determining row level security. In my case I created a Customer_Security table and added some restrictions so that certain users were allowed to see the data for certain countries. In my case I’m using SQL Server together with some Xtreme Customer data. Here you can see some sample data and the contents of the Customer_Security table:

2. Next, I need to create a Crystal Report which links the customer table to the customer security table and delivers back the expected results. When I created the report I used an outer join since no ever country in the customer table has an associated security setting for it.

3. Next I want to create a suppression formula on the row that contains data that restricted users can’t see. In this case I used the following suppression formula:

NOT (CurrentCEUserName = ‘ADMINISTRATOR’ OR
CurrentCEUserName = Uppercase({Customer_Security.Username}))

This TRUE if the user viewing the report is NOT the administrator or NOT a matching security value. This formula will cause the country records they do not have access to see to be hidden from view.

WARNING: In this example, I am not doing any special calculations, but if you do need to do summaries or groupings, I recommend that you set each value to a formula and within the formula you set values equal to blank (”) or 0 if the row should not be seen by the end user.

4. Now I can publish this report to BusinessObjects Enterprise and schedule the report to run as administrator and then view the report as ron. When I do this, I will expect to see all the records when logged in as administrator and only England, France and Germany records when logged in as ron.

Let’s schedule the report:

Crystal Reports applies formatting a view time, therefore it will evaluate the suppression formula for the individual running the report and apply it to the report instance. In this case the countries that ron is not allowed to see will be suppressed, even though they were retrieve with the original schedule instance.

Here is a view of what the administrator sees:

Here is what the restricted user ron sees:

We did not have to reschedule the report for ron, yet we were still able to achieve row level security from a scheduled instance! Do you know what happens now when I view this report from within Live Office? The suppression formulas are still applied at run-time and therefore the view security remains!

Here is what I will see from within Excel.

You can see here that I am accessing the Latest Instance and yet, even though the latest instance contains ALL RECORDS for the report, Live Office observes that suppression and resticts what the restricted user ron can see.

CONCLUSION: You can obtain row-level security from within Business Objects by using CEUserName and an external security table together with suppression formulas that are evaluated at run-time.

I wanted to share with you the funniest ringtone of all time. It starts off like the standard Nokia ring tone but then gets slower and slower as if the battery were dying on the phone. It’s hilarious and I love it. I always gets a big smile when people hear it for the first time. It’s the only ringtone I’ve ever added to my cell phone and I think you’ll love it.

Download it here – Nokia Dying Ringtone

Enjoy!