Introduction

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The idea for this book started several years ago, when a client claimed he learned more about universe design and development from a single quality assurance review than all the classes he had taken and books he had read. For a consultant, there is no higher compliment. Let me set the record straight, though: I think the vendor training and documentation is excellent. What makes BusinessObjects uniquely challenging, however, is that for business intelligence, it is not enough to know the software; you have to know the business and the business users. In this respect, it's not enough to know how to create a universe object-for example, you have to know why users need objects defined a certain way, how certain SQL settings prevent or enable users to answer a business question. This book is my attempt at bridging what is often the great divide between IT and the business in their quest for better access to information. My hope is that it helps you take your implementation one step further.

Oddly enough, what pushed me to formalize a book proposal was seeing books on competitive BI tools. Despite Business Objects' market leadership, there was only one professionally published book, years out of date and addressing only document creation. The market needed a more up-to-date and comprehensive book. I confess this book had humble beginnings, with my primary goal to cover universe design, since universes are the heart of a BusinessObjects implementation. Do well in the universe, and reporting and analysis is easier. Build a cumbersome universe, and users will construct overly complex reports, or worse, find other ways to get to the data. In discussing the book concept with McGraw Hill/Osborne, I got a lesson in book brands. They suggested covering more functionality and publishing the book under the Complete Reference brand.

I take things quite literally. Complete? My definition of 'complete' is the full set of vendor documentation that measures two feet on my bookshelf. So the work began to come up with an outline that would satisfy the majority of readers: business users, designers, supervisors, project managers, and sponsors. This book focuses on the business side of BusinessObjects and the core components that take you there: Designer, Supervisor, BusinessObjects, InfoView, WebIntelligence (referred to as WebI in the book), and Broadcast Agent. Therefore, it does not address installation, load balancing, and performance tuning techniques. Refer to the vendor documentation for these topics. Is the book, then, complete from the perspective of the full product offering from the company? No. But it is complete for a segment of readers? I hope so! If I've missed anything essential, please do let me know.

What's Inside

Part I, 'Getting Ready for BusinessObjects,' introduces Business Objects the company, the history of the product line, and the history of business intelligence. Project managers in particular will find Part I useful in understanding the people and communication issues that affect a BusinessObjects implementation. With the myriad of product choices and deployment approaches, Part I will help you stay focused on the users and the goals of your implementation.

Part II, 'A Better Universe,' covers universe design, maintenance, and integration with Supervisor. As you deploy BusinessObjects across the enterprise, there are choices about where to build the intelligence in relational tables, MOLAP cubes, the universe, and the reports. As well, the larger your company's deployment, the greater the need for test and production environments, a quality assurance process, and usage tracking. Part II gives you the tools to do this. Even if you are an end user, you will want to read sections of Part II to better drive the business requirements into the universe design.

Part III, 'Reporting and Analysis with BusinessObjects,' covers the end-user tools: BusinessObjects full client, InfoView portal, and WebIntelligence. Part III is when you finally get the return on your business intelligence investment as users explore and analyze data in ways never before possible. Part III covers the basics of accessing standard reports and exploring the data, as well as the advanced techniques of creating queries, defining complex conditions, and report formulas.

About halfway through the book, I learned that Business Objects would be releasing version 6.0 at about the same time this book would appear in print. Fortunately, much of the functionality in Designer and BusinessObjects is the same in version 6.0. The biggest changes are in WebIntelligence. After seeing the pre-beta, we decided these changes-and the breakthrough functionality-were significant enough to warrant inclusion. Chapter 24 introduces InfoView and WebIntelligence version 6.0. Even if you do not currently use WebIntelligence, you will want to read this chapter to see just how much Business Objects has closed the functionality gap between full-client and thin-client platforms. In the past, thin-client business intelligence often meant you had to sacrifice functionality for ubiquitous access. With WebIntelligence 6.0, the choice becomes largely an architectural one.



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Business Objects(c) The Complete Reference
Cisco Field Manual: Catalyst Switch Configuration
ISBN: 72262656
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 206

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