What Is BusinessObjects Enterprise?


With the explosion of databases and ERP/CRM/SCM functionality in the 1980s and 1990s, organizations have been increasingly been creating and storing data about their business. One of the major complaints about these implementations is that although a substantial effort was made to capture the data, in a lot of cases, the reporting and analysis of this data was often overlooked.

This infrastructure provides the underlying foundation to the reporting, query, and analysis and performance management tools, as shown in Figure 23.1.

Figure 23.1. The Business Objects product stack. (Used with permission from Business Objects.)


The stack consists of the following five components:

  • Data Integrator An extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) tool that can populate your data warehouse or data mart with the required data. Online transactional databases usually do not provide the optimal reporting schema. Data Integrator provides the ability to extract data from these transactional systems; cleanse, consolidate and transform the data into the required format; and then load this data into a data warehouse or data mart. The result is easily accessible data your users can trust.

  • Performance Management Provides the ability for users to define goals based on a corporate strategy. Users then compare actual performance against these goals, identifying trends, tracking their progress, and taking corrective action. These metrics and their associated performance are presented to the users in the form of a scorecard or dashboard. The performance management applications are a set of predefined but modifiable reports, analytics, dashboards, and scorecards built on industry best practices. These provide an excellent starting point for a performance management deployment.

  • Reporting Refers to the ability to create production reports and is the functionality provided by Crystal Reports. In addition to just creating reports, developers might want to embed reports inside applications or users might want to embed report components in their Office documents.

  • Query and Analysis The Query and Analysis tools allow the users to answer their business questions without the need for a developer to create a predefined report. Aided by the semantic layers, users can select their required fields and sort, group, and sum these fields to answer their questions. The product is designed in such a way that after one question has been answered, the query result should drive another question. For example, if sales were down, the user could query and sort by geography to determine which geography was performing poorly. After the user determined this, they might want to drill on this geography to see what products are usually sold there but have not been.

  • BI Platform The underpinning of all these products is the Business Intelligence (BI) platform.

BusinessObjects Enterprise provides a prefabricated, extensible infrastructure for creating, managing, and distributing information to a wide variety of information consumers.

The distribution of information is not limited to reports but can be anything from XML files to Excel spreadsheets. Furthermore, the device on which the information is distributed is not limited to the PC. It can be a cell phone, printer, or PDA. In some cases, the information from BusinessObjects Enterprise might not be viewed by a human at all, but uploaded into another computer system.

The last statement brings up the topic of what an information consumer is. For the most part, an information consumer is a human who is reading (consuming) the information. However, the information consumer could be another computer system that requests that a file be transferred to it, or it could request the information via a web service. For example, a nightly scheduled job could transfer a file to another system and this file is then uploaded (consumed) by that system.

The key word in all the above is information. The value that BusinessObjects Enterprise and its content creation tools bring is that they provide the tools to transform data into information. This transformation enables users to ask questions about how much inventory they have or what their share trades were for the day. This easy and efficient transformation of data to information is the real value of BusinessObjects Enterprise.




Crystal Reports XI(c) Official Guide
Crystal Reports XI Official Guide
ISBN: 0672329174
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 365

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