Data Integrator part of the new SAP BusinessObjects certification programme after all
Last week I ran into someone at an event and as the evening progressed we briefly discussed the new SAP BusinessObjects certification programme. I mentioned to him that it was a shame that the Data Integrator exam hadn’t been converted into an SAP exam, but he claimed that this indeed was case. Read more
Business Objects Certified Professional certification soon to be retired
The other day I was reading the latest posts in a topic of a forum I quite frequently visit and it came to my attention that the current SAP BusinessObjects certification programme will be retired by the end of April and replaced by a new SAP certification programme. Read more
How many people are in space right now?
Not much of a KPI, but there you go.
Business Objects XI 3.1 SP2 out soon
Judging from the fact that the release notes (S-ID required) have been released, it cannot be long before it’ll be available from the SAP MarketPlace.
How to make your (SAP Business Objects) training budget last longer in times of crisis
In these times of economic turmoil it might prove difficult to get funding for training courses you’d like to attend. Your training budget, if you have one, might have been cut or altogether dissipated. Timo Elliott wrote a helpful blog post with links to 96 (to be exact) SAP BusinessObjects web seminars, which should give you plenty of opportunity to further hone your skills or perhaps give you an idea what to spend that budget on. I personally prefer attending an actual class for seriously delving into a subject. But then again, I did become Web Intelligence certified by sheer experience and preparing for the exams with the aid of online materials on SAP’s Partner Training Catalog.
Crystal Reports licensing headaches
I cannot remember where I picked up the link exactly. Since Ken Hamady has been drawing attention to the new licence terms, it is likely that I picked it up from his site. What am I talking about? The fact that SAP BusinessObjects is making it difficult for trainers and publishers (and the likes) to use screenshots of Crystal Reports. This article in ITWorld Canada explains the issue quite well.
An extra tool to improve SQL Server’s performance
Microsoft published a new white paper on Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server.
Microsoft has finally decided what to do with PerformancePoint Planning
A while back Microsoft created quite a stir in the BI scene when they announced that they would stop further development of PerformancePoint Server 2007. At the time I was studying for the exam and, as you can imagine, was pretty pissed off (and stopped any further preparations for the exam immediately). The analytics part was swiftly moved to SharePoint and what was to become of the Planning part was unknown, until now.
One thing that might be confusing about using the Web Intelligence Rich Client
With the arrival of BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.0 the ability to view documents via a so-called Rich Client has been added to the suite. While the Rich Client might appear to be nothing more than a full client version (it requires a separate installation) of the Java version of Web Intelligence in InfoView, it does in fact have certain features that are not available in thin client version.
Teradata and SAP partner up
A few months ago there were speculations about the possibility of SAP acquiring a data warehouse company like Teradata or Netezza. It seems those speculations weren’t that far-fetched, as the news of the day is that SAP and Teradata are partnering up to support SAP BW on top of Teradata. Up until now SAP BW was only able to run on top of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or IBM DB2. Adding Teradata to the gamma could potentially be profitable for both parties as it could increase Teradata’s sales and at the same time provide another strong and scalable platform for SAP applications.