BI2013 Amsterdam - Only Two Weeks Away!

[Former Member]

We are now only two weeks out from BI2013 in Amsterdam, and I hope you are getting as excited as I am!

I have the privilege to deliver three presentations whilst in Amsterdam.  As always, I'll be active on Twitter so please feel free to engage me in person or on-line. Below you can find a preview of what my sessions will contain, including some useful tips!

An Introductory Guide to SAP's Enterprise Information Management (EIM) Solution Portfolio

Wednesday June 12th at 12:15pm

SAP's Enterprise Information Management, or EIM, portfolio is quite extensive and underpins SAP's Real-Time Data Platform. In this presentation, I focus on two of the key applications, Data Services and Information Steward, which are used for data integration, cleansing and data quality management - plus lots more!

This presentation will help introduce these tools to attendees who may not be familiar with them, so will also include lots of demonstrations of key functionality, like data profiling, view impact & lineage analysis and transforming data for loading into HANA.

As for tips & tricks, Data Services can be highly tuned.  Some Data Services developers aren't aware of the Degrees of Parallelism setting, which allows you to specify how many CPU cores the application can use for a particular dataflow.  This one setting can create a large performance increase in your ETL jobs.

Come along to my presentation for several more tips & tricks.

Best Practices for Designing Universes using the Information Design Tool (IDT)

Wednesday June 12th at 2:30pm

The Information Design Tool is still relatively new for many organisations, and so this presentation will focus on what's new to the Information Design Tool, as well as new features of the unx universe.

But more importantly, I discuss best practices in universe design, which apply to both the legacy unv universes, and the new unx universes. In my opinion, the universe designer has one of the most important jobs in a BusinessObjects team. A poorly-designed universe, the interface to all their information, can turn users off using the system. In contrast, a best-practice designed universe answers all business queries, is easy to understand for non-technical users, and performs very well.

Learn how to design universes with best practices in mind in this presentation.

Proven Design Techniques to Improve Formatting, Drill-down Navigation, and Performance of SAP Crystal Reports

Thursday June 13th at 10:15am

The title is certainly a mouthful, but this presentation is packed full of really useful Crystal Reports techniques that I've come across and learnt over my 12 years with Crystal Reports. We will cover techniques such as form layouts, dynamic suppression and advanced formulas. 

Did you know that when developing reports, the new Crystal Reports for Enterprise is very close to feature parity with Crystal Reports 2011? My presentation will use Crystal Reports for Enterprise for several demonstrations, and we will walk through each advanced technique.

Crystal Reports sometimes can be forgotten among all the new more interactive tools, however it is still the most powerful report development application in the BusinessObjects suite.  If you haven't used it before, I encourage you to give it a try!

See you in two weeks!