Does what happen in Vegas stay in Vegas? A Reporting & Analytics Update

[TammyPowlas]

Reporting & Analytics, held this week in Las Vegas, was co-located with Projects 2012 and Mobility 2012.  This event is produced by SAP Insider / Wellesley Publishing Services.

Here are the tweet documents for the events:

http://www.tweetdoc.org/View/57186/SAP-Insider-Reporting--Analytics-Conference

http://www.tweetdoc.org/View/57187/SAP-Insider-Projects-2012-Conference

Unfortunately due to the hurricane, some speakers could not make it to Las Vegas, and I assume this was true for attendees. 

First day I started with the BI4 Jumpstart with SAP’s Jason Rose, Ty Miller, and Ingo Hilgefort. 

This session was an overview of BI4, combined with a SAP integration update, and Ty Miller spoke about BI4 with Hadoop.  Some highlights:

Jason suggested everyone try out BI on Demand for free at

https://bi.ondemand.com/session/new

BI4 Feature Pack 3/SP04 offers report to report interface which SAP calls “insight to action”. 

He suggested that everyone try out Visual Intelligence for free at https://www.sap.com/campaign/ne/free_trial/visual_intelligence/index.epx?kNtBzmUK9zU

In the future, you will be able to save Visual Intelligence to the platform.  In response to question about when Visual Intelligence will have a native BW connection, he indicated that would happen sometime next year.

He also said there have been 1600 downloads of Visual Intelligence so far.  I didn’t get a chance to ask how many of those customers have been using it in production (question via Twitter).

Jason said the benefit of Mobile BI is offline content access.  Jason also demonstrated SAP Design Studio, BW Workspaces in Analysis Office, and discussed Analysis interoperability with Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence.

Some highlights from Ingo Hilgefort’s part in the Jump Start:

• Planned ramp-up for BI4.1 is mid next year
• Is BEx staying – an attendee asks.  BEx is in maintenance mode
• SSO possible for Analysis Office using SNC
• No plans to integrate BEx query designer in Analysis Office says   - two different sets of users
• Recommend leverage BEx query in BI4 against BW data sources.  Leverage capabilities of restricted and calculated key figures in BEx query in BI4 
• For large data sets use selection of structure members in RSRT 
• Ex queries are recommended as data sources for BI4 
• "Web Intelligence does not replace BEx" 
• Analysis Office & OLAP can skip levels of a hierarchy against BW 
• Only hierarchical scorecards in BI4 Dashboards SP04 with BW says 
• BI4 platform sizing leverage sizing guide for DSL bridge server & create separate APS w larger JVM configuration 
• Remember BW is a multi-dimensional engine
• Configure BEx Query to read data while navigation - transaction RSRT
• Analysis Office supports variants in 1.3; Analysis OLAP is planned for 4.1 
• Multi source universe cannot take advantage of calculated and restricted key figures in BEx
• Can move to BI4 and keep 3.1 Universe 
• Universe in BI4 does not connect to the BEx query
• Rapid Marts are available for ERP only customers- also for #SAPHana operational data reporting
• Crystal inside ECC is FREE (enhancement package 5)
• BI4 SP04 you can build ECC universe

The next day, after the keynote, Ingo Hilgefort held the first SAP Experts session.

This was a first, where SAP Experts provided attendees a copy of an article written by a SAP Expert.  In this session, Ingo spoke about SAP integration features that came with BI4 FP3/SP04:

Some highlights:

• Web Intelligence is not a multi dimensional client
• Analysis Office is getting updates every 6 months but no updates to BW back ends
• No automatic conversion of BEx workbooks with VB to Analysis Office
• SAP Design Studio will be released soon - based on Eclipse  output is HTML5 #SAPExperts
• Only migrate simple BEx workbooks to Analysis Office 1.3
• Customers are starting to use focused Analysis OLAP
• Fix in BI4 Analysis OLAP - can use BW display attributes
• BI4 SP04 can use report to report interface (RRI)

Also, I attended hands-on sessions with BI4 with SAP Integration, mobile BI sessions, and a session on embedded analytics.

Lastly, what is a conference without some swag?  I followed nic.smith tweet and visited the SAP booth for the Data Geek shirt:

I want to thank the SAP Insider team for a great experience and a great event.