The Big Picture

I recently ran across a post of a good friend of mine who was talking about the BusinessObjects Product Suite at a very high level. Overall in this blog I assume that you are familiar with many of the tools in SAP BusinessObjects, but in case you are not, I wanted to refer you to this nice overview article.

You can access it here.

When we talk with customers, we always talk about the solution that SAP BusinessObjetcts is going to provide to their business problem. That’s what it’s all about. How do we help an organization: increase shareholder value, decrease expenses, reduce risk, increase productivity and performance, etc. We do that through leveraging the technologies of the BusinessObjects Suite to deliver intelligent information (and ultimately value) to the customer.

Teleran – Your Database Nanny!

Okay – so the auditing and query management that comes with SAP BusinessObjects doesn’t do it for you? Need more umph? Do you want more real-time information about your BusinessObjects system? Are you experiencing query and database performance problems? Need to identify long running queries and kill them?

Every once and a while you hear about a partner technology that makes you say, Wow! And that is what I said when I saw a demonstration of the solution from Teleran.

These guys are amazing and have a great solution for customers that are running Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or DB2 (no Teradata yet). They have created specialized listeners in their iSight tool that watches the traffic and logs the activity in real-time. They even have a universe and reports already built using SAP BusinessObjects so that you can get up and going quickly. If you find a particular query is taking to long, perhaps you need to tune the universe and tweek the database. Teleran can show you the problem.

If you are having problems with user generating bad SQL, out-of-compliance queries, or if you simply want to add additional governs around the system they also have a tool called iGuard. iGuard is integrated directly into tools like WebIntelligence, so instead of a user getting a message like, “Query Error ODBC – Unable to Connect”, then can get a message like, “The product server is currently down for maintenance. Please try again in 25 minutes”. Now THAT is user friendliness.

Because Teleran understands how SAP BusinessObjects works, even if you are using a single user id such as “report_user” at the database level, Teleran can read the user, universe and connection, etc. information and let you easily audit who is doing what at the database level. Don’t worry about turning on database logging and slowing down your production database. You can offload the work to Teleran.

The Greatest Part of All

The greatest part of Teleran is not that it’s a great solution for SAP BusinessObjects managers and administrators, it’s great for the entire EDW. Why? Because Teleran runs between the database and the query tool and is NOT SAP BusinessObjects dependent. You see, it can monitor ALL queries – not just queries from BusinessObjects. This means that if you have users access the database via TOAD, you can turn it off. You can turn off access to any unauthorized reporting/SQL generating tool.

To me, this seems like a must have solution for organizations who are struggling to get a handle on their data warehouse and need to make sure they are delivering a robust and high performing environment.

Check it out! You’ll be glad you did.

When using Xcelsius 2008

I’ve been spending a lot of time of late getting myself familiar with the new interface of Xcelsius 2008 and I like it so much better than the older Xcelsius 4.5 interface. The embedded Excel spreadsheet is real dream and the new Data Manager, which manages all the external connections make it easy to keep track of where data is coming from.

Xcelsius Error 2170 or 2048

There were a couple of things I learned during the transition that I thought would be good to share. The first is around security. With the release of Xcelsius 2008 we have moved to support for Flash 9. In Flash 9, they have tightened up security a bit more. Here is one of the first messages I got when trying to run a Xcelsius file with LiveOffice or Web Service connected data. My problem is a flash security issue. SWFs running locally (directly from a user’s computer) have additional restrictions imposed on them since version 8 of the Flash Player.

This error is coming from the Adobe Flash Viewer. If you see error messages like this in the future, you can look them up here. This has the complete list of ActionScript runtime errors.

To get around this error I need to tell my application server that it is okay to trust requests from other domains. This means I will need to create a crossdomain.xml file for your application server.

I have created a crossdomain.xml file that you can download here:
http://trustedbi.com/files/crossdomain.xml

Here are the contents of the file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
 <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false" />
 <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />
</cross-domain-policy>

On Tomcat, you need to add this file to the /tomcat/webapps/ROOT directory. Each application server is different, so you may need to check the manual for your specific application server.

For More Information on crossdomain.xml

For more information on crossdomain.xml look here. Even more information about crossdomain.xml and Macromedia is found here.

Hope this help you achieve smooth sailing with Xcelsius 2008!

Upgrading to Xcelsius 2008 Tips & Tricks

I recently starting moving my BusinessObjects Enterprise Xcelsius models from XIr2 to XI 3.0. I have found that you may need to modify some of the elements after your model has been upgraded. Namely you will need to:

• Modify the URL of the web services
• Modify the URL of the embedded opendocument calls
• Modify the models

I can’t say that these changes are completely unexpected, but it unfortunately these changes will need to be part of a manual process. I think that part of the problem is that we haven’t integrated Xcelsius into any type of structured lifecycle management.

Modify the URL of the webservices

As I move my Xcelsius model from one physical machine to another, I had to go back into each Web Service and change the name of the machine it was pointing to. I also had an issue with my Universes. It appears that somehow, it lost track of exactly which universe I was pointed to (perhaps I changed the CUID during the migration to XI 3.0) so I had to manually edit each one and make sure it was working. In some cases, once I manually picked the right universe, the query still didn’t work. It would throw an error. So I discovered a special trick.

TIP: I found that when the system lost track of my universe I could click on the Show the option dialog… and it seems to fix everything. I think it realizes that the objects in the query are the same as the old universe and repoints the objects correctly.

I also found that you can no longer just copy the URL from the QaaWS administration panel and paste it into Xcelsius 2008. You need to actually click on the which shows you the definition. From there you can click on the WSDL link and it will reveal the correct WSDL “url”. You can see that the URL below contains the end-notation, ?def. The WSDL will be exactly the same but say ?WSDL.

Modify the URL of the embedded opendocument calls

Ouch – what a pain. In XI 3.0, they changed the location of opendocument.jsp from http://<hostname>:<port>/businessobjects/enterprise115/desktoplaunch/opendoc/openDocument.jsp to http://<hostname>:<port>/OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp

This means you need to either create your own redirector logic on the application server, or rebuild all your opendocument URLs. I can’t say I’m too surprised (it changed from CE10 to XI to XIr2). It’s just that we now see customer’s using opendocument.jsp so much more because it’s a great way to integrate Xcelsius dashboards with Crystal Reports and WebIntelligence documents.

Modify the Models

So far I’ve not had too much trouble in moving my dashboards from Xcelsius 4.5 to Xcelsius 2008, however there are clearly differences in the way the product works. For example, I had a dashboard that did some lookups and returned zeros. In Xcelsius 4.5, when I used the option Ignore cells at End-of-Range option, it would ignore a text cell with the value 0 and a numeric value of 0. Now, it will only ignore the values in the column if they are truly blank.

I’m not saying the old way was right or wrong, it’s just that now the interpretation of “blank cells” has changed. It used to include cells with 0’s but now it really means only blanks.

Therefore – fair warning. When moving to Xcelsius 2008 you need to make sure and test each and every model to make sure it is still working in exactly the same way.

Conclusion

Overall, I love the new features of Xcelsius 2008. I love the fact that the worksheet is now integrated into the model and the updates to the model take place in real time, but expect a few bumps along the road. Like the fact that when you switch between Preview mode and the Normal mode, Xcelsius can’t seem to remember the sizes of the properties window on the right and the worksheet on the bottom-middle.

The whole world reduced to 100 people…

Here’s a different time on “the numbers” – some we look at all the time in the world of Business Intelligence.

A good friend of mine send me an email that explains our world in numbers. It’s fascinating and I recommend you check it out. You’ll be grateful you did!

The whole world reduced to 100 people. What would it look like? Watch this video, “The Miniature Earth”, to find out.