BI4 Elite Enablement Training - It's a Wrap!

[TammyPowlas]

When jens.koerner spoke to us last May at ingo.hilgefort ASUG Annual Conference BI4 Pre-Conference session about doing BI4 Elite Enablement training, I confess I was skeptical.  Why was this needed at all, I thought? 

I am happy to say I was totally wrong. What an event!  Attendees used words like "priceless".  One attendee said he solved three issues at work from learning based on the training alone. 

Here is Jens kicking off BI4 Elite last week in the SAP Vancouver Executive Briefing Center:

Jens said there were attendees from 8 countries.  One attendee came all the way from South Korea as there was a last minute cancellation.  Jens said 87 people registered for 44 slots...so if a BI4 Elite training opportunity comes up soon, sign up fast.

Also Kirsten Sutton, Managing Director of SAP Vancouver, came on the first day to welcome attendees.

Attendees were able to view the presentations and exercises on their iPads, thus saving paper (and saving us from carrying paper).  SAP said they saw attendees do this at SAP TechEd and thought it would be useful.  Plus the presentations could (and did) change without having to reprint.

Ty Miller gave an updated BI Roadmap presentation (cover in jakob.barnard blogs) but what was different about this Roadmap presentation was that Ty allowed interactive questions as he gave the presentation.

An early exercise was on SAP Visual Intelligence against flight data.  The attendee who finished first won a coveted SAP Press book by Ingo Hilgefort:

Day 2 Donnie McMillan showed us how to set up BI Mobile on the iPads. Then the tracks were split into two rooms: BW track and data agnostic track.

Then through BW exercises with Ingo Hilgefort, we were able to deploy Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, and Explorer to the iPad:

Web Intelligence on iPad - note the pie chart is blanked out due to room lighting

Exploration View on the iPad, creating during a BW track exercise with Ingo Hilgefort.

There were so many hands-on exercises with fast help / response from SAP.  Here the attendees are creating an ECC Universe:

On Thursday afternoon the two tracks came back together and we got hands on with Apache JMeter testing and Fidder. 

There was also some fun, with nic.smith distributing Data Geek shirts ( sap.com/datageek ) for those who went on camera:

Attendees were also given BI4 Elite shirts, which many attendees wore on the last day:

This is ASUG Volunteer Rajeev Kapur wearing the BI4 Elite shirt.

We also got to learn more from SAP's Toby Johnston (covered here in this blog) and customer stories (in this blog)

It was a combination of education, hands-on and networking.  It was a great experience and thank you SAP - especially jens.koerner ingo.hilgefort ty.miller and many more.

I greatly miss Vancouver already, the site of my new-found favorite coffee Caffe Artigiano