BusinessObjects Administration

Key Takeaways from BusinessObjects as Part of BI Strategy for the Next Decade Feature Image

by John S on March 1, 2022 No comments

BusinessObjects as Part of BI Strategy for the Next Decade Feature Image

Did you miss our March 1st webinar BusinessObjects as Part of BI Strategy for the Next Decade? We have a quick summary of the webinar with the webinar presenters’ key takeaways from their session. This session had a lot of audience interaction with the presenter and we highly recommend checking it out if you use Web Intelligence!

Here is the webinar overview:

As the world continues to navigate a global pandemic that started well over a year ago, the importance and significance of Business Intelligence has never been more critical.

Yet, at the same time, most organizations find themselves in a situation where time, resources and budget have never been tighter. As a result, making better and more use of the BI applications in place makes a lot of sense. For many, that means leveraging BusinessObjects as it remains the most widely used BI suite in the world today.

In addition, between Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports, it offers the best BI reporting platform available.

While tools like Tableau and PowerBI are gaining larger market share in the BI space, they are used for data discovery and data visualization and not designed for BI reporting.
It is for this reason, that most organizations who have adopted these tools, retain BusinessObjects for BI reporting.

This session will both discuss and show real customer case studies of how existing BusinessObjects are adapting to the new co-existence norm and how companies, new to BI, are adopting BusinessObjects as part of their new BI strategy for the next decade.

Key takeaways from this session:

BusinessObjects Remains the Number 1 BI Reporting Platform in Use Today
BusinessObjects co-existence with Tableau and PowerBI is the new normal
Moving to BusinessObjects BI 4.3 in the next 18 months makes sense
Only move BusinessObjects to the Cloud when the majority of data sources it accesses are also in the Cloud

Don’t forget you can stream this webinar in its entirety as well as ever other Let’s Speak BO webinar we’ve hosted when you are logged in on the site. It is completely free to join!

Key Takeaways from Solving Business Problems with BusinessObjects

by John S on January 5, 2022 No comments

Solving Business Problems with BusinessObjects Webinar Summary Graphic

Did you miss our January 4^th webinar Solving Business Problems with BusinessObjects? We have a quick summary of the webinar with the webinar presenters’ key takeaways from their session. Here is the webinar overview:

Using Business Objects for finance reporting has been around for decades, but have you considered using it for data analytics to look for fraud?

This session we’ll cover common data analytics scripts and how BusinessObjects could be utilized to help mitigate fraud. We will discuss ways to solve seemingly complex business issues with the tools we have while demonstrating technical solutions using Web Intelligence and IDT for being able to show data analytic to resolve specific business. So put on your Fraudster cap and hold on for the ride.

Key takeaways from this session:

You don’t always have to buy new software to meet your company’s needs.
Think outside of the box with Business Objects – it is more than just a reporting tool.
Business Objects can be used for Data Analytics, Robotics and so much more.
Searching with wildcards is easy once you learn the subtle differences between query vs report search

Don’t forget you can stream this webinar in its entirety as well as ever other webinar we’ve hosted on our Speak BO website when logged in.

If you have any questions about the session feel free to comment below and we will get back to you!

Let’s Speak BO Together– Highlights of 2018

by Bree-Anna Mustad on December 19, 2018 No comments

The Let’s Speak BO Webinar series that began in the winter of 2015 just recently concluded its third straight year of bi-weekly Business Intelligence Webinars with a fantastic close. Adam Lange, with A. Lange Consulting, lead a jam packed session dedicated to all of the new things our BusinessObjects community can expect when upgrading to BI 4.2 SP6. From Administrative enhancements to reporting feature releases, our SpeakBO listeners received a wealth of information to consider with their BusinessObjects investment moving forward into the New Year.

For me, it has been a privilege not only hosting the Let’s Speak BO webinar series for three years, but also forming relationships with the vast BusinessObjects community worldwide. Some of my favorite emails and calls have been with devoted listeners expressing gratitude and excitement for the free educational offering, which seems to be quite unique these days in the space of SAP BusinessObjects information sharing when it comes to the original core BusinessObjects toolset.

Here’s a look at some of the topics hosted in 2018 that viewers found very helpful to not only improve their personal work with the tools, but also inspire decision making when it comes to upgrades, looking into third party solutions, leveraging the existing platform and all of its features, assisting group training within organizations, and more.

BusinessObjects Administration:

This year we hosted a variety of topics for BusinessObjects Administrators. The topics include:

...and of course the latest and greatest with the recent release of BI 4.2 SP6.

Inspired by our listeners, the Let’s Speak BO webinar series has put together a new lineup of Administrative topics for 2019.

Topics like:

Customizing your BI Launchpad for Global Branding and Organization Synchronization
Discovering the Administrative Management Tool in Web Intelligence
A Migration look at Converting Desktop Intelligence Reports to Web Intelligence

…and much more!

The World of Web Intelligence in 2018:

One of the most requested, well attended, and popular topics among the BusinessObjects community seems to remain that of the well-regarded reporting tool- Web Intelligence. This year on Let’s Speak BO, we put together more topics on Web Intelligence for our listeners than ever before. And still, they cannot seem to get enough.

In a single hour, our viewers received fantastic deep-dives into topics like:

…and so much more!

The topics didn’t end there.

This year we had fascinating case studies and new topics on:

As a listener myself to these amazing sessions, I have learned a lot about where the community of BusinessObjects is in regards to educating themselves and wanting to improve upon their usage of these fantastic tools. It inspires me to further my relationships with individuals and organizations, large or small, out there who are inspired to grow within their investment by continuing to learn about these tools, and more importantly, help others within their organization expand their reaches by learning and educating themselves as well.

To conclude the year, I would like to thank a special few of our listeners who shared countless calls and emails with me chatting about their experiences with BusinessObjects and sharing their story on how they lead educational sessions and webinars of their own, inspired by our bi-weekly webinar series. Or how a professor of a prestigious university has his students not only listen live to our webinars, but then write papers or conduct group projects on what they learned, to better prepare them for the real world.

These stories, I personally get to leave the year with, have truly inspired what’s to come:

2019’s Line up of Webinar Topics
Open Format Discussions
Live Q&A’s

…and brand new customer case studies that I hope you all continue to enjoy and benefit from.

Key Features in SAP BusinessObjects Promotion Manager for Administrators

by Bree-Anna Mustad on July 27, 2018 No comments

Key Features in SAP BusinessObjects Promotion Manager for Administrators Feature Image

This webinar explores some of the key best practices in utilizing the Promotion Manager tool within the LCM options inside of SAP BusinessObjects. Promotion Manager, an Administrators side-kick, contains a wide range of features and actions that allow administrators of BusinessObjects to save on time as well as space when running reports or day to day jobs.

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This is an important tool to be aware of when considering major upgrades or large migrations in BusinessObjects. By understanding much of the tools capabilities, Administrators can save time and interruptions by working through some of these key best practices.

SAP BusinessObjects Administration Can Be Self-Serving?

by Bree-Anna Mustad on July 23, 2018 No comments

Self-Service BusinessObjects Administration Feature Image

An hour didn’t seem long enough in the Let’s Speak BO webinar hosted on July 10^th 2018 as Minith Patel, Senior Consultant and SAP BO Administrative expert, took our listeners through a case by case adventure of how to become a fully sufficient, self-service BO Administration organization.

>>VIEW THE WEBINAR

This was a fascinating and creative look at what it means to think through the array of situations that might arise with employee requests when it comes to making necessary adjustments to their environment while maintaining the integrity of an organization’s administrative security.

Here are just a hand-full of the topics explored:

CMC restricted features
User Group Assignments
Customizing your CMC Tab Configuration
Why team delegation to a helpdesk alleviates the administrators
Creating certain windows AD self-service groups based upon departments
The LCM toolset and how they can best be used
Setting up tasks, events and assignments
A sneak peek at the automation framework tool

Far too often the SAP BO Administration for an organization neglects to evolve itself in terms of alleviating workload by consolidating the common requests into a new map on how to expand towards self-service concepts. This webinar allows administrators to imagine creative ways on how others can assist themselves within the CMC and BI Launchpad while maintaining user restrictions in order to improve work productivity and reduce redundancy of day to day tasks for the BI Administrator.

For those looking to learn more about the LCM tool, Promotion Manager, check out our webinar on The 12 Best Practices for using Promotion Manager happening July 24^th at 10am PST. You can find it on our upcoming webinars page.

SAP BusinessObjects Cloud Migration – A Case Study to Take Notes On

by Bree-Anna Mustad on June 27, 2018 No comments

BusinessObjects Cloud Migration – A Case Study to Take Notes On

Senior Consultant and BusinessObjects Expert, Rajesh Ponnurangam hosted a webinar this week that to our audience, was well worth taking notes on. The case study webinar focused on a large migration from XI 3.1 to BI 4.2 with Crystal Reports to Crystal Reports Server 10 hosted in the cloud.

This story, although highlighting key steps and methods that ultimately landed this organization at their desired goal to conclude the migration with a success, also came with many lessons learned. Rajesh shares an intimate look at each of the steps that were involved in such an arduous task.

To begin, Rajesh took the audience through a look at the plan form the initial stages after assessing both the environment and timeframe allocated to migrating, updating and testing the soon to be cloud based environment from the old. The stages were as follows:

What is takes to prepare for an upgrade
Installing the BI Platform using a third party cloud hosting provider (in this case AWS; Amazon Web Services)
The migration of reports using the Upgrade Management Tool within SAP BusinessObjects
Configuring and testing the environment (which was explained to have taken 70% of the entire project’s time).

VIEW WEBINAR RECORDING NOW >

Whether you are an SAP BusinessObjects Crystal user, or an SAP BusinessObjects user to the entire suite, this webinar is a fantastic case study for the sheer in-depth process and planning details, the lessons learned, as well as the value of migrating testing. For those considering in moving to the cloud with their SAP Platforms, this recording will provide guidance and shine a light on all aspects to consider when it comes to the array of options in cloud hosting providers. The important pieces I extracted from this webinar was how, in the end, the majority of issues and time constraints in finalizing the project wound up to be on the cloud server side rather than any issues in regards to the migration of BusinessObjects reports.

Platform Optimization: Harmonizing Processes at a Nationwide Supermarket Chain

by Bree-Anna Mustad on June 14, 2018 No comments

Platform Optimization: Harmonizing Processes at a Nationwide Supermarket Chain

This case study is a fascinating one for any organization, supermarket or not, that is looking for a holistic Business Intelligence approach to multiple platform synchronization in order to improve upon data governance and the consolidation of reports. Albertsons/ Safeway, a recently merged Nation-wide supermarket chain has for many years heavily relied upon SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise as their primary reporting software. Coupled with SAP BI4 and InfoSol’s InfoBurst Enterprise Platform, this webinar takes an in-depth approach to looking at how a Business Intelligence team created an effective management strategy in order to join data generated from SAP BI4 and the InfoBurst Platform into a single analysis and reporting platform.

VIEW WEBINAR RECORDING NOW >

Case Studies hosted on our Let’s Speak BO webinar series seem to gather the most attendance, primarily because all of us within the BusinessObjects community are continuing to look for way to leverage our existing environments in better, more efficient ways. Rather than the unfortunate approach these days, to moving off of our investments into something new.

Crystal Reports and Crystal for Enterprise have both been around since the beginning of SAP’s BusinessObjects adoption. Over 37,000 Companies in the United States today still rely upon Crystal as their primary reporting tool. These records, considering the advancements in tools like SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, are still quite high considering the majority of our high-tech age in the business world seem to still prefer viewing their reports in PDF or Excel outputs, regardless of the reporting tool used. Crystal is fantastic for this. From generating invoices, creating neat and customizable reports, to pushing data out on a scheduled bases with InfoBurst to large subsets of customers, emails, FTP sites, in formats like PDF, Excel and more… Albertsons/ Safeway succeeded in a fascinating Business Intelligence use case of what it means to consolidate, leverage, automate, and ultimately “optimize” their multi-platform investment.

What's new in SAP BI 4.2 SP5? A great question for all of us

by Bree-Anna Mustad on April 11, 2018 No comments

A common question in everyone’ mind who uses SAP BusinessObject after a release of the latest build is what’s new? What features have been added or removed and where is the latest BI 4.2 headed?

Adam Lange with A. Lange Consulting, a fantastic presenter, expert and consultant on everything BusinessObjects hosted a jam-packed session on just that. The hour for such a topic could not have been long enough as he dove into demonstration after demonstration on the latest features, enhancements and differences in BI 4.2 before SP5.

This is a webinar well worth listening to if you are curious about what to expect when planning to upgrade to the latest service pack, or if you are in question on whether to upgrade based upon the features and enhancements to the latest build.

With each service pack in SAP BusinessObjects the features that have been improved for users, changed or removed all together always seem to determine whether we are actually looking forward to upgrading our version or whether we are content with waiting in order to keep using the features and navigation tactics that we have gotten used to. This webinar hosts an array of both pros and cons, depending on how you currently use the toolset, and also sheds light on the direction future service packs may take due to some the changes and enhancements in features a lot of us use when working within the BusinessObjects toolset.

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Adam Lange will be back on our Let’s Speak BO in a much anticipated Ask the Web Intelligence Experts, a round table discussion of open format Q&A in which users of the beloved reporting tool can ask any question that pertains to SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence. Adam being both a SAP BusinessObjects Administrative expert and extremely well versed in Web Intelligence is always great about answering questions that pertain to both report writers and administrators of the SAP tool set. For more information on this webinar coming up please visit Upcoming Webinars.

User Specific Options in BusinessObjects and more

by Bree-Anna Mustad on March 29, 2018 No comments

Let’s Speak BO’s fantastic BusinessObjects Administrative expert, Amy O’Neel, joined the community again in an in-depth and information session focused on User Specific Options in BusinessObjects.

Diving into user roles, group roles and maintenance, Amy took the audience through live demonstrations enhanced with step by step ‘how to’s’ while discussing the comparative features native to BusinessObjects Administration. This webinar highlighted the differences between Native and Business filter options as well as personalizing variables with BOUSER and other system variables.

For administrators, this was a fantastic webinar to take notes on; our SpeakBO listeners were able to learn about how to structure and maintain customized user and group options in BusinessObjects to best cater to their security rights and data access within their organization.

| View Webinar Recording

User Specific Options in BusinessObjects is a region in BusinessObjects Administration that can also rely upon task-assisting third party solutions. Some of the solutions mentioned in this webinar were InfoBurst Publish; a report distribution and delivery platform that can automate and refresh the reporting content in a manner that exceeds the native BusinessObjects publisher, as well as 360Suite.

For more information on the third party solutions that can assist with BusinessObjects Administration visit us here.