Attending SAP BI4Elite Enablement - Day 1

[Former Member]

Getting to attend BI4 Elite Enablement is a pretty big deal.  Present are individuals that cover 16 customers and 7 partners - representing 8 different countries. SAP brought a lot to the table as well with 11 trainers, 10 developers, 60 cloud servers set up, and had 87 registrations for the 44 seat class. At the time of writing the announcement had around 4,300 views.  Folks are excited for this class - and they should be.

We started the day going over a kickoff presentation by Jens Koerner and then the BI Roadmap by Ty Miller.  Note we have seen versions of the roadmap presentation out on the SAP Marketplace as well as ASUG webcasts.  Some of my notes from the presentation...

Roadmap – out now:

• WEBI 4.0 now has CSS and Waterfall charts
• Report to Report Interface in 3 different tools
• Mobile is on its own release cycle
• BI SP5 – coming next week?  SP4 Patch 6 is latest version (Need clarification on this)
• Predictive Analysis , visualizations
• Consistent BICS across landscape.
• Collaboration – SAP StreamWork

Roadmap – Future: (note was given that these are forward looking statements and things could change_

• New gui based installation, supposed to be far better
• Auto-update to manage desktop client updates
• 4.1 coming mid 2013 – big point release?
• For BW environment, your semantic layer is the BEx query.  Not SAP, semantic layer isthe Universe.
• Rich Clinet (desktop thick client) – speed and ease of movement wins hands down with precice control, Rich Web Client
• Design Studios and Dashboards will eventually merge into one platform/solution for dashboarding.
• BEx the “reporting tools” will not be innovated on.  It is where the naming is getting in the way.  BEx the Queries will continue to be your semantic layer and where you write your queries.  The design studio Analysis for MS Office, will be your end report building tools based on those queries.
• Design Studio Next week!  Part of SAP BI SP5

We followed the roadmap presentation with some hands on exercises covering WEBI, Dashboards, Explorer, and Visual Intelligence.  This took is to lunch.

After lunch we came back to a HANA overview and review of the connectivity options.  The HANA section was concluded with some practical hands on exercises that demonstrated constructing Analysis views of data within HANA.  It works a lot like the Information Design Tool used to construct Universe connections.

The next presentation was on Installation and Configuration by Harjeet Judge.  A fair amount of time was spent on different scenarios and also included the patch section.   A demo was given for this section covering Unix/Linux installations.

We wrapped up the day with practical labs covering ODBC connections and Web Deploy.  The labs were well done and did a good job demonstrating 32bit vs 64 bit connections in addition to changing the view of the BI Launch Pad and deploying those changes.

It was a great start to the week and I am really looking forward to starting the deep dive sessions tomorrow morning.  During the day there was a lot of time for Q&A that sparked a lot of additional questions and discussions.  Getting to listen in and participate in this has been very useful.

For those interested there are various folks tweeting
updates from the class – follow them here: @olorinpc, @jenskoerner, @racheljfloyd, @tpowlas, @Rajeevkapur_08, @jmsrpp, @brighttony.