David Taylors Business Intelligence Blog

I recently ran across a post of a good friend of mine who was talking about the BusinessObjects Product Suite at a very high level. Overall in this blog I assume that you are familiar with many of the tools in SAP BusinessObjects, but in case you are not, I wanted to refer you to this nice overview article.

You can access it here.

When we talk with customers, we always talk about the solution that SAP BusinessObjetcts is going to provide to their business problem. That’s what it’s all about. How do we help an organization: increase shareholder value, decrease expenses, reduce risk, increase productivity and performance, etc. We do that through leveraging the technologies of the BusinessObjects Suite to deliver intelligent information (and ultimately value) to the customer.

Okay – so the auditing and query management that comes with SAP BusinessObjects doesn’t do it for you? Need more umph? Do you want more real-time information about your BusinessObjects system? Are you experiencing query and database performance problems? Need to identify long running queries and kill them?

Every once and a while you hear about a partner technology that makes you say, Wow! And that is what I said when I saw a demonstration of the solution from Teleran.

These guys are amazing and have a great solution for customers that are running Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or DB2 (no Teradata yet). They have created specialized listeners in their iSight tool that watches the traffic and logs the activity in real-time. They even have a universe and reports already built using SAP BusinessObjects so that you can get up and going quickly. If you find a particular query is taking to long, perhaps you need to tune the universe and tweek the database. Teleran can show you the problem.

If you are having problems with user generating bad SQL, out-of-compliance queries, or if you simply want to add additional governs around the system they also have a tool called iGuard. iGuard is integrated directly into tools like WebIntelligence, so instead of a user getting a message like, “Query Error ODBC – Unable to Connect”, then can get a message like, “The product server is currently down for maintenance. Please try again in 25 minutes”. Now THAT is user friendliness.

Because Teleran understands how SAP BusinessObjects works, even if you are using a single user id such as “report_user” at the database level, Teleran can read the user, universe and connection, etc. information and let you easily audit who is doing what at the database level. Don’t worry about turning on database logging and slowing down your production database. You can offload the work to Teleran.

The Greatest Part of All

The greatest part of Teleran is not that it’s a great solution for SAP BusinessObjects managers and administrators, it’s great for the entire EDW. Why? Because Teleran runs between the database and the query tool and is NOT SAP BusinessObjects dependent. You see, it can monitor ALL queries – not just queries from BusinessObjects. This means that if you have users access the database via TOAD, you can turn it off. You can turn off access to any unauthorized reporting/SQL generating tool.

To me, this seems like a must have solution for organizations who are struggling to get a handle on their data warehouse and need to make sure they are delivering a robust and high performing environment.

Check it out! You’ll be glad you did.

I’ve been spending a lot of time of late getting myself familiar with the new interface of Xcelsius 2008 and I like it so much better than the older Xcelsius 4.5 interface. The embedded Excel spreadsheet is real dream and the new Data Manager, which manages all the external connections make it easy to keep track of where data is coming from.

There were a couple of things I learned during the transition that I thought would be good to share. The first is around security. With the release of Xcelsius 2008 we have moved to support for Flash 9. In Flash 9, they have tightened up security a bit more. Here is one of the first messages I got when trying to run a Xcelsius file with LiveOffice or Web Service connected data. My problem is a flash security issue. SWFs running locally (directly from a user’s computer) have additional restrictions imposed on them since version 8 of the Flash Player.

This error is coming from the Adobe Flash Viewer. If you see error messages like this in the future, you can look them up here. This has the complete list of ActionScript runtime errors.

To get around this error I need to tell my application server that it is okay to trust requests from other domains. This means I will need to create a crossdomain.xml file for your application server. For more information on crossdomain.xml look here. Even more information about crossdomain.xml and Macromedia is found here.

On Tomcat, you need to add this file to the /tomcat/webapps/ROOT directory. Each application server is different, so you may need to check the manual for your specific application server.

Hope this help you achieve smooth sailing with Xcelsius 2008!

I recently starting moving my BusinessObjects Enterprise Xcelsius models from XIr2 to XI 3.0. I have found that you may need to modify some of the elements after your model has been upgraded. Namely you will need to:

• Modify the URL of the web services
• Modify the URL of the embedded opendocument calls
• Modify the models

I can’t say that these changes are completely unexpected, but it unfortunately these changes will need to be part of a manual process. I think that part of the problem is that we haven’t integrated Xcelsius into any type of structured lifecycle management.

Modify the URL of the webservices

As I move my Xcelsius model from one physical machine to another, I had to go back into each Web Service and change the name of the machine it was pointing to. I also had an issue with my Universes. It appears that somehow, it lost track of exactly which universe I was pointed to (perhaps I changed the CUID during the migration to XI 3.0) so I had to manually edit each one and make sure it was working. In some cases, once I manually picked the right universe, the query still didn’t work. It would throw an error. So I discovered a special trick.

TIP: I found that when the system lost track of my universe I could click on the Show the option dialog… and it seems to fix everything. I think it realizes that the objects in the query are the same as the old universe and repoints the objects correctly.

I also found that you can no longer just copy the URL from the QaaWS administration panel and paste it into Xcelsius 2008. You need to actually click on the which shows you the definition. From there you can click on the WSDL link and it will reveal the correct WSDL “url”. You can see that the URL below contains the end-notation, ?def. The WSDL will be exactly the same but say ?WSDL.

Modify the URL of the embedded opendocument calls

Ouch – what a pain. In XI 3.0, they changed the location of opendocument.jsp from http://<hostname>:<port>/businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp to http://<hostname>:<port>/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp

This means you need to either create your own redirector logic on the application server, or rebuild all your opendocument URLs. I can’t say I’m too surprised (it changed from CE10 to XI to XIr2). It’s just that we now see customer’s using opendocument.jsp so much more because it’s a great way to integrate Xcelsius dashboards with Crystal Reports and WebIntelligence documents.

Modify the Models

So far I’ve not had too much trouble in moving my dashboards from Xcelsius 4.5 to Xcelsius 2008, however there are clearly differences in the way the product works. For example, I had a dashboard that did some lookups and returned zeros. In Xcelsius 4.5, when I used the option Ignore cells at End-of-Range option, it would ignore a text cell with the value 0 and a numeric value of 0. Now, it will only ignore the values in the column if they are truly blank.

I’m not saying the old way was right or wrong, it’s just that now the interpretation of “blank cells” has changed. It used to include cells with 0’s but now it really means only blanks.

Therefore – fair warning. When moving to Xcelsius 2008 you need to make sure and test each and every model to make sure it is still working in exactly the same way.

Conclusion

Overall, I love the new features of Xcelsius 2008. I love the fact that the worksheet is now integrated into the model and the updates to the model take place in real time, but expect a few bumps along the road. Like the fact that when you switch between Preview mode and the Normal mode, Xcelsius can’t seem to remember the sizes of the properties window on the right and the worksheet on the bottom-middle.

Here’s a different time on “the numbers” – some we look at all the time in the world of Business Intelligence.

A good friend of mine send me an email that explains our world in numbers. It’s fascinating and I recommend you check it out. You’ll be grateful you did!

The whole world reduced to 100 people. What would it look like? Watch this video, “The Miniature Earth”, to find out.

Here are a few things I noticed when installing XI 3.0 that I thought I would pass along.

#1 – Time Remaining
The system no longer tells you the time remember. It was always fun to explain the end of the install when it was deploying the web applications and it would jump around from 2 seconds remaining to 2 hours remaining. Now you just get a simple and effective progress bar.

#2 – Wir sprechen Deutsch!
You should notice a heck of a lot more languages. BusinessObjects has embraced the concept of language packs and now allow you to create your own language packs.

#3 – New Utilities!
Diagnostic Tool, Software Inventory Tool , Translation Manager. I also don’t see the Security Viewer so hopefully that will be available as a separate install.

#4 – Silent Installation
Now you can create a “response” file by creating a blank text file and running setup.exe from a command window using: setup.exe -w C:\my_install_response.ini. You can then use that response file to do a new install by going to the command line again and running: setup.exe /qb -r C:\my_install_response.ini

#5 – In-Place Upgrade – Schweeet!
Hate finding new hardware to do an upgrade? XI 3.0 let’s you do an in-place upgrade. If you install XI 3.0 on a server that is already running XIR2, then it will detect it, copy the CMS content over, point the FRS of XI 3.0 to your existing FRS and let you uninstall XIr2. If you don’t like that, then you can do a side by side installation. It’s also supported (but be aware of potential port conflicts between the BOE or Tomcat services)

Other Things You Should Know

• The initial release is Java-only. A .NET version is scheduled to ship later this year.
• There is no native 64-bit version of BusinessObjects XI 3.0. It does however support 32-bit mode for 64-bit operating systems.

It always been a pet peeve of mine that when software installation programs assumes that you want to install it on the C:\Program Files directory. How hard is it to create one more screen to allow the users to change the installation location?

Over that last two days I’ve been installing the new BusinessObjects XI 3.0 onto a test system and really enjoying working with the new software. Since I was involved in the pre-beta process, it was especially satisfying to see some of the changes that have been made since October 2007. Since I was not involved in testing Xcelsius, I’ve been really excited about getting my hands on Xcelsius 2008 and giving it a test run.

Today I installed Xcelsius 2008 and my pet peeve surfaced. Sure enough, I accept the license agreement; I put in my keycode; and the installation begins. What?@!? No chance to specify the installation directory? Well, since it was the last piece of software to be installed, perhaps it saw that I already had OTHER BusinessObjects software installed and so it rightly assumed that I would want to install it there. Nope. It assumed C:\Program Files.

So what’s are you supposed to do? How do you get software to install somewhere OTHER than C:\Program Files?

The answer is a little trick I learned while installing Crystal Enterprise at Coca-Cola. They too were adamant: No non-Windows OS software on the C Drive! In those days we had a problem with the installer. Even though you told it to install on the E: drive, it would still install 5 or 6 files on the C drive.

Here is the answer:

• We need to modify a registry entry. Now like anyone I need to say, don’t do this if you don’t know what you are doing
• Launch regedit
• Go to the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
• There you should find a subkey call: ProgramFilesDir. It should already be set to C:\Program Files
• Modify the String value of this subkey to match your directory. In my case I wanted to install the Xcelsius under E:\Business Objects, so I used E:\
• Exit the Registry Editor
• Install Xcelsius 2008 (Reboot if necessary)
• Go back into the registry editor and change the value back to “C:\Program Files”
• Reboot again (for good measure – gotta love Windows)

I found that Xcelsius 2008 asked me to reboot, so I did. When it came up the first time my system told me that one of my services didn’t start. I then changed the value back to “C:\Program Files”, rebooted again and everything was fine. I don’t know if that will happen to you or not but that’s what I had to do.

Good Luck. Hopefully you’ll see the ability to specify your installation directory in a future release.

You gotta love Dilbert.

Crystal Reports you say? What version? It’s embedded in your application? How is it embedded? What does it do? Do you know what Developer Libraries they used? SDK? What? Who? When?

To be honest, the reason I joined Crystal Decisions all those many years ago was because of Crystal Reports. I’d used Crystal Reports may times in the past and I’d always been amazed at how easy it was to use. I was an old ISAM guy, so the fact that this tool could write SQL was pretty cool. (of course now I know that it’s not as good at writing SQL as other tools, but ignorance is bliss.) When I found an opportunity on HotJobs for a Presales Consultant I jumped at the chance. I’d always worked at small companies with < 150 employees and now – wow – I could get a chance to help sell a product that just about everyone in IT has heard of.

Why has everyone heard of it? Because it’s everywhere. The one good thing about Crystal Reports is that Greg Kerfoot knew the power of market share, so he bundled packaged, included, gave away, OEM’ed, shipped, advertised Crystal Reports in every way, shape and form. It really became a household name. A true reporting standard. Long before anyone ever thought of the term Business Intelligence, Crystal was blazing a trail, which brings me to my question at the start of this blog.

Can I Upgrade My Crystal Reports?

The great thing about Crystal is that it’s everywhere. My first few months at Crystal Decisions I learned that customers had developed all kinds of crazy was to use Crystal Reports and I needed to understand how they might use it so I could help them… especially as the web was now in full swing and people were wanting to web-enable their old Visual Basic applications.

Well, here is a summary of what I’ve learned over the years regarding Crystal Reports. There were a lot of different SDKs (Software Developer Kits) that were introduced over the years. As technologies changed, so did the libraries available to developers for creating applications. Here is a timeline of these changes.

Click to Enlarge

The Bad News

The RDC, the most popular of the SDKs available for Crystal Reports has been depreciated and will not ship with XI 3.0. Although we introduced a new web-client centric SDK in 2002 with the advent of Crystal Reports 9 and Visual Studio .NET many customers have been slow to modify their legacy applications. When moving for RDC to one of the new APIs, you must rewrite your application.

Just like all other code migration from Visual Basic 6 to the .NET Framework, recoding is necessary when migrating from the Report Designer Component in Visual Basic 6 to Crystal Reports .NET. This is because of the new .NET APIs, which vary from the COM APIs.

One of my favorite stories was from back in the Crystal Reports 8 days. I remember visiting a customer who was complaining the Crystal was crashing. I went onsite and in those days if a machine has an IIS server on it, you could access Crystal Reports through the ActiveX viewer by referencing the report in a shared directory. This customer was running 120 concurrent users on a single CPU machine!! They had purchased a $500 piece of software and were serving up reports to thousands of end-users. No wonder the machine was falling over. That poor DLL was getting hammered. (Fortunately in Crystal 8.5 we limited the number of concurrent threads to 5 and no one complained that “Crystal was crashing”. Now it was time for us to collect… because before the 5 concurrent users had been a paper license).

Here is an example posting on Diamond for someone who can’t find all his old RDC features in the new RAS SDK.

The Better News

Crystal Reports continues to provide a RAS SDK as part of the Crystal Reports Developer Addition. This RAS SDK can be used to both embedded as well as managed report environments. An embedded environment is when you manage all the Crystal Reports content yourself through your application. This may be convenient but means there is a lot more work for the developer to do around managing content, scalability, etc.

Note: Consider carefully whether you will use embedded or managed reporting for your development product because the SDKs calls will vary slightly depending on which you use. In any case, make sure and encapsulate your logic around user authentication and opening reports. If you do need to change from embedded reporting to managed reporting, HERE is an excellent whitepaper that walks you through the process.

Originally we followed Microsofts lead my offering a web farm/web garden license, but that just got confusing. Now we make it a lot easier.

If you use Crystal Reports in an unmanaged mode, you will have a limited number of threads you can use. In some cases we offer packages with increased threads (For example we used to offer Crystal Enterprise Embedded which provided more capacity. This is no longer available outside of our OEM channel.) In all other cases, you will need to move to a managed reporting model. That means you will need to move the processing of the Crystal Reports off your application and onto a secondary service which will handle the report processing for you.

The introductory version of this server is called Crystal Reports Server.