Diversified Semantic Layer

In Orlando? Go to our tweetup. Not? Watch the videos here and here.

Our shizzle

• If you're meeting with Jon Reed this week, do a little legwork here first.
• Also, the crew dialed up SAP Support this week.
• We don't normally peer into the future here, but you should go to Greg's session on Tuesday.

How-to Corner

• Is Deski is still under the BOBJ brand?
• Need a HANA cheat-sheet?

BI Talk

• We are NOT sharing this link just so you'll know who to yell at this week.
• Want to chat about mobile BI this week?

Enterprise What-Not

• SAPPHIRE is this week. Expect this little section to be MUCH thicker next week.

Do you really want to change the game?

Contributors in some form or fashion: Jon Reed, Timo Elliott, Kristin Scheffler, Courtney Bjorlin, Tom Wailgum, David Tailor, Ryan Goodman, 

And the winners are...

Our shizzle

• If you'll be in Orlando, follow us to get Tweetup updates. Everyone who is anyone will be discussed at it.

How-to Corner

• You had us at scheduling lunch breaks.
• Want to spend some money learning FP3?
• Dallas will be relieved that eFashion can work in BI4 (FP3).

BI Talk

• Steve Lucas has heard from Oracle, and he's not gonna take it anymore.
• If you've got answers, SAP has questions.
• On data that is virtually worthless.
• The only thing missing from Tammy's BI4 roadmap recap was the "forward-looking statements" slide.
• Why yes Corporate IT Change Management Police, BI is special.
• Howard Dresner helps Stephen Few throw up in his mouth just a little bit.
•  

Enterprise What-Not

• Jon Reed takes on SAP Consulting fraud as only Van Halen can.
• In case you needed another reason to hate Oracle.

Thanks, Gabo, for turning the Layer crew "Hollywood."

Contributors in some form or fashion: Donald MacCormick, Emily Mui, Howard Dresner, Jon Reed, InsiderLearningNetwork, Steve Lucas, Tammy Powlas, Nic Smith, Mark Bradbourne, Coy Yonce, Raphael Branger

What do you mean you don't have an iPad AND you haven't registered for Annual Conference yet?

Our shizzle

• Paul Clark, no longer an international Social Media Ambassador of Mystery.
• Eric helps you keep your IDT work area high and tight.

How-to Corner

• How to save yourselves $1,000+ dollars.
• How-to do... pretty much everything in the newest Xcelsius.
• Why-to... let your users have the Webi Rich Client.
• Want more than a couple hundred rows of data to sample from?

BI Talk

• Sure hope Timo brings the samples that don't fit to Orlando. 
• In the Stephen Few vs. everybody debate, we side with anyone who is willing to disagree with Mr. Few.

Enterprise What-Not

• EMEA gets all of the cool stuff before we do.
• Vijay gives SAP some tough questions heading into SAPPHIRE.
• Surviving tech conferences.

Don't forget to tell your BI story and save some moolah.

It was dashboarding week, pretty much everywhere. Dallas and Tom provide some great recaps (with tons of links), so we'll relax with a cocktail while they guide you through the highlights.

Our shizzle

• Congrats, Josh. 
• Hurt feelings and questions abound in our recap of the future of Xcelsius.
• Hurt feelings and questions abound in Jamie's recap of the future of Xcelsius.
• And now, a word from our sponsors.

How-to Corner

• Webi in BI4, thoughtfully deconstructed by DSLayer alum Michael Welter.
• Andrew reminds us that you need more than technical skills to deliver a dashboard.
• Nothing fires up the crowd like formatting changes.
• Want to install Data Services in a distributed environment?

BI Talk

• To summarize, one really sucks.
• Actual BusinessObjects in the cloud?
• XComponents has entered Ramp Up. 
• Mostly including this link for the Wildebeest.
• We'd be willing to bet that the biggest winner in the mobile Xcelsius roadmap is Antivia.

Enterprise What-Not

• Congrats to our buddy, Matthias Steiner. Hopefully he can bring the silver lining to SAP's cloud.
• Are we seeing the dawn of a newer, nimbler SAP?
• At this point, the only thing holding back WorkDay is it's "too HR-ish" name.
• Apparently you must do your job to have your job.
• Cindy Jutras recaps database/mobile day for the business person.
• SAP, still maintaining an abusive/co-dependent relationship with its developers?

Finally, check Eric and Greg going Canadian.

If you missed out last Tuesday, more info here, here, and here (and if you're really into here, here, and here).

Our shizzle

• Greg and Jamie, geeking each other.
• Josh and Clint help you get smart about IQ.
• Josh (and, by proxy, us) gets a shout on page 41 of Inside SAP.
• Jamie talks about why an in-memory move makes sense now.

How-to Corner

• The new BI destination sensation (courtesy of Dallas, the person).
• If you are anal-retentive, we've got some help for you.
• The Galactic Federation is good, all others are up for debate.
• Killing some Data Services.

BI Talk

• If you make more than $150/hr, don't bother clicking here.
• Are Legos the new Xcelsius?
• We're number eins!
• ASUGNews, via Ray Wang, talks about HANA today.
• Apparently Eric Lai knows more than just mobile. 
• At the CO-PA, Provimi fell in love. 
• Data as food?
• 5th graders as data scientists? It's better than another video of a 2 year old using an iPad, we suppose.

Enterprise What-Not

• So SAP's response to the rise of the native experience is... investing in HTML5?
• This HANA + Augmented Reality + Kinect is pretty cool (and not just because of the super-wide belts).
• If you've ever hired technical people you won't be surprised by the fraud Jarret sees in SAP consulting, but the comments are pretty fun.

We know you're trying to speak at SBOUC, but please do consider attending ASUG Annual Conference/SAPPHIRE and kicking up a controversy of your own.

We're guessing this announcement tomorrow will give us plenty to next week.

Our shizzle

• Josh humblebrags his fancy new partner certification, what with all of the fancy getup and his vendor-confirmed knowledge and all that.

How-to Corner

• Want to migrate your imported groups into different BOBJ Instances? Well, do you, punk?
• Twitter and Crystal: a good time separately, alerting when combined.
• Another nugget on using HANA Studio. 
• For when you absolutely, positively, inexplicably need to read the SQL from a Webi Report out using the Java SDK.

BI Talk

• In case you haven't taken the opportunity to dissect the latest Gartner BI Report.
• Geek on, HANA fans. Geek on. 
• Turns out BI isn't a magic bullet for Small and Midsize Businesses. 
• SAP announces Predictive Analysis. If you didn't aready know that, you're in the target demographic.
• Yeah, good luck with that.
• To HANA, or not to HANA.
• Do you even have a Data Warehouse?

Enterprise What-Not

• Still trying to figure out how to get to ASUG Annual Conference/SAPPHIRE? How about for free?
• May be time to get your LinkedIn profile up to date.
• Dennis has gone and developed... well... something.
• If you're looking to sell software to SAP, we'd start here.
• The Apple model for IT. Easier said than done.

To close, a pie chart from one of our very favoritest new blogs, DoghouseDiaries.

For those of us that can't quite swing a Mastering event, may we kindly remind you to plan to be in Orlando? 

Our shizzle

• Jamie looks at clouds from the CIO's side now.

How-to Corner

• How to "HANA".
• Dave shares some more advice on blogging.
• An entirely different Dave altogether goes a little more technical and talks about troubleshooting your BI Services.
• Say hello to our little (and free) friend that helps you figure out just how much horsepower you'll need to get to BI4.
• This is Dutch to us, but Xavier Hacking shows us how to do shadow ETL out of BW better. 
• Drilling to detail within Webi.

BI Talk

• If they think BI On Demand is part of the "story" from SAP Analytics, we're selling our CNN Money stock right now.
• Dallas Marks, asking the tough questions on Xcelsius/Dashboard Design.
• Is Self-Service BI a red herring?
• There is a big difference between having a lot of data and being able to use a lot of data.
• For our readers wishing to stay (or get) employed.
• Donald MacCormick, asking the tough questions.
• Mobile BI, Mobile Explorer update.

Enterprise What-Not

• John Moy weighs in on Mobile Middleware Layer as a Platform as a Service (MMLaaPaas?).
• For those of us that can't quite swing a Mastering event, may we kindly remind you to plan to be in Orlando? 
• And you were worried SAP wasn't a going concern.
• Tom will you tell you that Excel isn't going anywhere. We couldn't agree more.
• It isn't always easy to continuously improve (present company excluded, naturally).

In case you missed April Fool's Day, BI4.5 will include Deski 64 bit, SAP has released MindWeaver, Gmail Tap is coming out, Kodak is ready to replace the kittens that HANA has cost us, and DSLayer is providing you with the opportunity to take "Deski Everywhere."

If you haven't registered for ASUG Annual Conference/SAPPHIRE, stop reading this and GO DO IT!

Our shizzle

• If you want to know about the Remote Support Component, there are few places better to start than with Greg Myers.
• Jamie wonders aloud, and to no one in particular, if SAP still doesn't quite get mobile.

How-to Corner

• Want to connect to HANA in FP3? What, are you from the future or something?

BI Talk

• Dallas has a unique cat-related idea that may, in fact, kill off a couple-dozen kittens. 
• We realize everyone who was anyone was somewhere cold last week. If you weren't anyone, Timo has you covered.
• The title is a sconch misleading, but good points about Oracle's performance nonetheless. 
• Why yes, baseball season is sneaking up on us.
• Bluefin seems to have taken a real shine to BPC lately (particularly those with last names rhyming with "Snappleby").

Enterprise What-Not

• Finance on HANA. Now that is a value proposition.
• Jon Reed and some friends get down and dirty on developer engagement.
• Tom Wailgum really wants you to upgrade to ECC 6.0. [editor's note: Tom doesn't actually care.]
• Who, at this point, would consider Oracle for anything? Oh, still lots of you? Fine. But Larry Ellison is crazy.

And don't just take our word for it that you should be headed to Orlando. Former guest Jeff Duly thinks you should, too.

Surprised anyone had time to write anything this week, what with all of the buzz around the new SAP Community Network, but here goes.

Our shizzle

• The band got together and did our first face-to-face-to-face podcast to talk about BI4, FP3, and whether either are ready for prime-time.
• Eric waxes philosophic on how users can make us stronger.
• Jamie thinks you should go ahead and get excited about SAP BusinessObjects Explorer.

How-to Corner

• Much appreciation to Andrew Fox for helping us find the location intelligence capability available in Explorer (yes, even in 3.1).
• Andrew really wore his blogger hat this week and gave us the KISS of BI4 tuning.
• New to the layer, Paul Berden talks Pareto Charts in Webi.
• Cumulative Waterfall Chart (via Josh Tapley)

BI Talk

• Want to get more out of ASUG Annual Conference/SAPPHIRE?
• ASUGNews reports that HANA may have some promise for classic BOBJ shops. 
• Cindi Howson talks about a newer, home-grownier predictive analytics tool from SAP.
• Gross.
• Speaking of FP3, here is a pretty thorough list of what's new. 
• Someone please give us a review of the new Mobile Analytics Toolkit?

Enterprise What-Not

• BPC is technically a BusinessObjects product, right?
• Congrats, Sameer. Good luck with Streamwork.
• Get 'em, Den.
• We strongly encourage you to ignore the comments on the SCN Update.

Should we geek about the weather?

• Where in the world was Adam Binnie when Josh Fletcher caught up with him?
• Greg likes the Remote Support Component. You all like Greg. By the transitive property of addition, you all now like the RSC.
• "Why are you still paying for multiple enterprise BI Tools?" ponders Jamie.
• Jamie encourages all of you to get out there and get on tape.
• We sort of hope you all read this last week (or, if you are in Australia, tomorrow).
• Sweater-ties: not just for aesthetics anymore.
• Jonathan Haun's post on Explorer 4.0 with HANA will catch you up on a lot (and we mean a lot) of Explorer's history.
• Another day, another "Dallas has found something goofy with BI4."
• Fine. Two days.
• What's so wrong with manually coded extracts?
• We're a little miffed that Andrew McAfee hasn't gotten us invited to the Sloan conference yet, but you should read his domain knowledge outsourcing post anyway.
• Slow down there a minute buddy; you're saying that Finance has software options beyond Excel?
• Some of our good friends helped out with Jason Cao's BI Fellowship initiative.
• This week's how to? Using Input Controls.
• Well if it's gonna be that kind of user group meeting, it's a good thing ASUG invited Jon Reed.
• If Vijay has some optimism about SAP's cloud strategy, he probably hasn't spent much time on BI OnDemand.
• Mark Bradbourne wants to know why it is that you what it is that you do? 

Die, kitteh.

• Eric and Jamie caught up and recorded some old friends in Vegas this week.
• Jamie thinks the Mayans will give us at least 4 more years.
• At BI2012 this week Jamie found hope that SAP has finally figured out a database portfolio.
• Other people (like Davin and David -- no typos) also wrote about BI2012.
• Donald MacCormick records the beans on HTML5 Xcelsius (or, as we'd brand it, Xcel5iu5).
• For more on why Xcel5iu5 is relevant, we recommend checking out Jon's session with Mico and Ryan.
• The BI #SAPChat this week was fun, but we'd really like for the chatters to delve a little deeper on some of their answers soon (Thanks Timo, Cindi, and Alys).
• Luca Spinelli gives away a nice little Xcelsius screenshot feature for free.
• Freakonomics has some fun with "data scientists."
• Explorer for the little guy?
• Sounds like Lauren Trees has been listening to Dallas Marks.

Yes, we did tweetup in Vegas, and yes, some people showed up. As a matter of fact, this weekly recap is our 100th piece of content published.

• Paul Hawking sits down to be interviewed.
• And then Dan Grew kept our "accented interviews" weekly theme going.
• Jon Reed hits the nail on the leadership head.
• BI2012 - "Probably worth it for the keynote alone."
• The news here isn't that Tableau is a challenger -- we sort of new that -- the news is that SAP is the worst non-niche player at executing.
• We're not sure anyone is having more fun with BI4 than Dallas.
• Donald MacCormack argues that it was Voltaire, and not Spiderman's Uncle Ben, who first said "With great power comes great responsibility." Also something about dashboards or apps or something.
• Recent guest David Poisson opens the kimono about SAP drinking their own champagne. (BINGO!)
• We hate sharing Xcelsius tips on its way to a slow death, but here goes. 
• Lots of our favorites quoted in this HANA piece. This seems to becoming relevant much sooner than we anticipated.
• Timo, let us know when they develop a donut that will call us fatties.

Have skis, will manage?

Lot of us traveling this week. Can't nobody break-a our stride, can't nobody slow us down.

• Eric ponders whether we actually make enough use of our less-diversified semantic layer.
• A far more technical dive into why Sybase IQ is just so damned smart than we've seen so far.
• Dave Rathbun shares an interesting use case for Explorer.
• If you aren't busy on Wednesday morning, three (other) BI heavy hitters are going to answer your twitter questions. 
• Sounds like this will save some admins some time. This probably will too.
• And don't worry. We'll save BI developers some time, too.
• And all week we thought that SAP was just pulling another app out of the App Store.
• Holy crap, is SAP giving away free BI4 training?
• BeyeNetwork, trying to make the hard stuff easy.
• Michael Bestvina discusses just how important it is for SAP to eat SAP's own lunch.
• Videographic proof that John Appleby and Dennis Howlett can be seen and not heard (2:28 mark) (and yes, we would love to be invited next year).

Enjoy your week. Check us out rocking the newest fashion trend out of the SAP Analytics team.

Monday the 13th. Let's dig in. 

• Crystal Vs. Webi Part Two (please comment).
• SAP has finally offered HANA to the rest of us? ASUGNews asks if we even care.
• May be just about time to stop complaining that no HANA customers will show themselves.
• Dallas is turning into a real monster with his punny blog titles.
• In case you missed Gartner's London BI Summit, Timo has you covered.
• Take a "page" from David Gilbertson with this Xcelsius trick. (Page? Get it? Huh? Huh?)
• If you've got training budget left this summer, Infosol would like to invite you to Southern California.
• Want to help create some data points rather than just visualize them?
• Our sponsor would like for you to consider measuring the ROI of your BI deployment.
• Mark Bradbourne offers some user adoption advice.
• No reason to rush the new SCN.

We're gonna reshare the wrestling poster here since the graphics department worked so hard on it.

• Team Webi vs Team Crystal, anyway? Part 1, Part 2, Tweet Poll
• There is a reason it isn't @GregXXL.
• Greg and Eric are writing a book about BOBJ. A pre-order would make a pretty exciting Valentine's Day gift.
• ASUGNews weighs in on Big Data.
• David Lai wants you to turn your BI into applications by writing back from Xcelsius.
• Must be David week, as Tailor encourages you to read the release notes.
• Tom Wailgum encourages you to be better at Twitter than we are.
• Love SQL but hate duplicate records? This blog post may be just what the doctor ordered.
• Having a hard time selling EIM 4 around the office? 
• Timo Elliott with a pretty fair assessment of his prognosticating prowess.
• Want to build your Data Warehouse on Sybase IQ?
• We're sure Jonathan Haun would agree it's pretty good for non-SAP shops, too.
• Think they used Crystal or Webi to create this awful mortgage statement?
• We are pretty glad, to this point, that SAP's BI Apps have been available through the regular App Store (via Jon via Jarrett).

Know someone who has mentored you in SAP BusinessObjects? Nominations are open, and it does make a difference.

• Eric takes us behind the curtain of securing your internal BusinessObjects deployment.
• Now that we sort of know where Mobile BI is going at SAP, can we hurry up and get there? 
• Dallas Marks turns in his Feature Pack 3 wish list a little late for Christmas.
• We're obviously semantic-dependent people, but Donald makes a compelling case that "Dashboard" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.
• Sounds like 2012 is gonna be a great year for ASUG community content.
• We've often said it isn't BI's job to kill spreadsheets (but we'd like to help them be correct).
• If this book can tell us how to mow through ETL faster, we'll take ten copies.

Here's hoping that Hasso thought up HANA over a slightly more refined bottle of wine than this.

• All 10 of Dallas's BI resolutions for the year are useful, but 2, 3, and 4 center on our (least) favorite piece of legacy software.
• Dennis Howlett provides us with fantastic analysis and terrible charts regarding SAP's 2011 financials.
• BI4, finally allowing us to change the default user preferences.
• No one should be surprised that BI is leading the charge for Shadow IT.
• ASUGNews gives you a handy-dandy rundown of all of the vocabulary you'll need to know to sit through a SAPPHIRE keynote.
• Good piece on why BI needs to be operational.
• Is it just us, or should any write-up about the size of the BI market include a chart or dataset or something?
• Fresh Direct s doing cooler stuff with BusinessObjects than just about anyone.
• Let's all welcome the newest members to the team that none of us will ever use.
• No offense to Cindi, but aren't these the same BI predictions every has? From this year and last?
• What's better than a third party Xcelsius add-in? A free third-party Xcelsius add-in.

The on-field Super Bowl matchup may be set, but we can't wait to see what commercial tops this one.

• Steve Lucas explains the future of mobile BI at SAP (without really mentioning how Xcelsius fits in or doesn't -- but then he kind of did). Jamie immediately puts his hand out for one more app.
• Not stalker-y at all, Jeff.
• For those of you who thought that being locked in to a litigious vendor was priceless...
• $30 million dollar BI prize alert!
• Cool introduction blog from Xavier Hacking. Siri, meet BI. BI, Siri.
• The seven deadly sins of Webi (of course, by not using Deski you've already won).
• And, since no one has talked about Xcelsius all week, here's how you can make those cool square charts in there. 
• Great piece by Vijay on the year ahead, and the year in your hand.
• For those of you who hate financial reporting as much as we do. 
• BI and Basketball (and don't think for one second think we aren't considering renting a booth for this). 
• A trip down Mobile BI Memory Lane.
• Apparently someone has never heard of Solution Manager.

And here is one last unflattering photo of Larry Ellison before SOPA kicks in.

• Congrats to ASUGNews for a successful first year (and thanks for the BI review).
• Fan favorite Michael Welter shares with us how to perform a Universe review, with all that implies.
• If you're looking for a troubleshooting time-saver, Dallas Marks has an idea for you.
• Vishal Sikka talks enterprise renewal, but we'd like to remind him that not all layers need dissolved.
• Anyone else a little uneasy how often HANA and BI are lumped together?
• Though the 240,000 downloads metric is arguable misleading, here's a decent summary of Mobile BI solutions from BOBJ.
• Joshua Greenbaum thinks SAP should stay away from selling hardware, Vijay isn't so sure he's right, but Steve Lucas gets the square. 
• Jeff Duly is giving an Explorer case study for ASUG, and we wouldn't miss it. 

Finally, congrats to Aslan Noghre-Kar , who is moving up at SAP. Good luck, you handsome devil.

Happy New Year everyone. Feel free to start sweating your upgrades anytime now.

• In case you missed it, Happy Holidays from the whole team.
• Eric sat down with Ken Hartman to kick off a new Unstructured Geek Analytics project where we chat up all of the BOBJ SAP Mentors.
• We were surprised we didn't make this list, then remembered we actually started in 2010.
• If our resolution were to BI more mobily, we'd start by reading this article.
• And then the Business Analytics blog snubbed us, too (we think we qualified with this).
• But they did give us a good compilation of customer success stories.
• Cindi Howson confirms that not a lot of pure BI news came out of the SAP Influencer Summit.
• All Dave Rathbun wanted for Christmas is to validate prompts.
• Gretchen helps us build up our SCN credibility in the easiest way possible. 
• It's not too late to submit an abstract for ASUG Annual Conference. You've still got a couple of hours. 
• Mark Bradbourne (of #BIWisdom fame) talks about  why your social analytics need to recognize that ":(" isn't always a bad thing.

Here's hoping your yesterday didn't look like this.