What an exciting year on so many fronts. Overall I am grateful for all the opportunities that came my way.
First up, ASUG:
I didn’t get this ASUG shirt this year – I didn’t have any room in my luggage to fit the current year shirt. Still it was a busy year with ASUG Influence Councils, webcasts, ASUG Annual Conference, TechEd, and the BusinessObjects User Conference.
Someone once said “you get what you put into ASUG” – well for sure I spend time on ASUG but what I get back in return is more. ASUG Influence Councils are the hidden treasures of ASUG; it took me several years to realize this but it is a great opportunity for long-term relationships with SAP and other customers.
At this year’s ASUG sessions at SAP TechEd SAP’s christina.miller strongly encouraged us to select more customer sessions; the feedback we received last year was that customer stories were missing. We worked hard to correct that.
This is a shirt I received from ingo.hilgefort for his website http://www.mastering-sap-and-businessobjects.com/
On this website you will find BI4 recordings and blogs, especially dealing to BI4 SAP integration.
I liked the high quality of Ingo’s books, even before meeting him in person a few years ago. This year he offered me a chance to review his BI4 SAP Press books:
Reporting an Analysis with BusinessObjects
Integrating SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.x with SAP NetWeaver
and his new ground-breaking interactive Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for OLAP With SAP NetWeaver BW which is available via iTunes or iBooks . It is the first interactive eBook on BI4 for the iPad for only $24.99. The eBook is easy to use and read that my 10 year nephew can review it on the iPad
I am grateful to Ingo for all the opportunities and mostly he always encourages to me to reach higher and aim higher. Ingo encouraged me to attend Mastering BI in Australia last August – an incredible event run by the wonderful Eventful Group. I thank him for being a mentor to me.
Ingo also encouraged me to attend the BI4 Elite training, discussed below
nic.smith gave me this shirt at Reporting & Analytics event in October. There’s still time for you to enter the Visual Intelligence Data Geek content at sap.com/datageek
I must say I have been using Visual Intelligence a great deal lately; it will read “bad” data that MS Access will not. Unfortunately I am not allowed right now to share more about it. There have been many strides in Visual Intelligence such as Universe 3.x and 4.x support, 32 bit support, and more.
BI4 Elite – this was black belt training in BI4 last month in Vancouver, arranged by jens.koerner . Jens spoke to me at the last ASUG Annual Conference and I was totally skeptical. I am happy to say this was an incredible event where we all learned so much – not just from SAP but other customer stories as well, which I plan on writing more on what I have learned and implemented as a result.
Both Ingo Hilgefort and Jens did so much for this event - working literally day and night. If this event is offered in 2013 - don't hesitate to sign up for it ASAP.
Last but not certainly not least the Mentor shirt. So many great opportunities come to SAP Mentors and I am grateful to mark.finnern
mark.yolton maria.farrales & others. TechEd Las Vegas was incredible experience allowing Mentors to assist SAP with hands-on sessions. The SAP Inside Tracks (which are not Mentor-only events) were all great whether I presented or simply attended. I neglected to add to the best practices for SAP Inside Track – if marilyn.pratt arranges an SAP Inside Track you must go – she thinks of everything – food, recording, mingling, and getting the community involved.
All in all it was a busy, productive, fun year.
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