I attended a recent BOUG Meeting in London. It was an interesting day and I gleaned a lot of useful information from the speakers and attendees. I’ve put some brief notes together below if you’re interested in my thoughts on the meeting. Also attached some of the presentations given and some links below to product information.

Please feel free to ask if you want even more details (more detail?? you’ll be lucky!!) or other issues or queries with BOXI and I’ll be happy to help if I can.

BOUG Meeting, London 12th June

After an introduction by BOUG chairman, Nigel Dorian, the user group meeting commenced with a SAP/Business Objects corporate update by Sean Farrington, Regional VP for EMEA, covering Business Objects/SAP corporate performance, nothing really of note to report on here,however it did give a perspective on the state of the BI market. More interesting was the next speaker, Donald MacCormick, Chief Transformation Officer, again from Business Objects, who delivered a presentation covering the Business Objects Product Road Map and Latest Announcements. Points of interest here were the four new(ish) products demonstrated:

BusinessObjects Polestar

BusinessObjects Text Analysis

BusinessObjects Predictive Workbench

BUSINESSOBJECTS XCELSIUS 2008

I found the demo’s very interesting, they showed some of what is possible using BOXI, though I feel they are “nice to have” applications rather than “need to have”. POLESTAR and XCELSIUS may be applications of most interest to the business here, POLESTAR is highly flexible and easy to use, giving results in seconds for inexperienced users, perhaps useful for very occasional BOXI users? XCELSIUS, with it’s graphical representation of reports, would be a manager’s favourite I’m sure! Given it’s functionality and ability to interact with other applications (such as yahoo! Maps) there may be more scope to make use of this product than I’m currently aware of. I was impressed by the ability of the text analysis tool to pick out correct and meaningful data from the free text inputs it was given, however I’m not sure if there’s anywhere in our business that would benefit from such an application. Predictive Workbench eases discovery of trends and patterns in data, allegedly this is a fab tool, and to be honest it looked impressive – however as I’m a predictive analytics newbie then I couldn’t comment on how good or bad Predictive Workbench really is!

Mark Hudson from Antivia ended the morning’s sessions with a presentation on “Web 2.0 for BI - Desktop and Scenario”, this presentation introduced the concept of Web 2.0 interacting with BI tools and the benefits that could be gained. This is an emerging aspect of the BI world, as such the technologies are still in their infancy and new applications for the technologies are being developed, however an strong theme throughout appears to be collaboration amongst user and how BI can draw on this collaboration and provide useful insights into how users interact.

After a surprisingly enjoyable lunch, the afternoon session began with a brief presentation covering the changes to On-line Technical Support, courtesy of Paul Hanson, Manager, European Technical Assurance Centre, Business Objects. In brief, the support offerings have changed at the front end but not at the back end, as follows, Calls should now be initiated online rather than via phone, the business objects portal will be accessible through SAP website and new logons for this purpose will be issued to current users, case histories will be migrated from old to new systems. It was emphasised that there will be no changes to the personnel dealing with the cases – SAP will retain the BusinessObjects experience.
Quick BI - A new approach to BI Prototyping Ivan Bartolo and Elton Barry. 6pm demonstrated their prototyping tool, “Quick BI” where the focus is getting the end users of reports to be involved in the design and development of reports from the start of the project, in an attempt to give the users what they want, thus reducing the time required to develop reports. The demo showed how a magnetic whiteboard and some magnets (in the shape of report components, i.e. cross tabs, charts, single cells, etc) could be used by end-users to quickly design a report, a picture is then taken of the whiteboard, this pic is scanned and a working report, as per the picture, is generated. A methodoly to work alongside the technology was also outlined. Again , this looked really slick and if used properly could reduce development time is most cases. The reports are generated using Dummy data but I’d expect that a version which was more integrated wth Business Objects and could be linked to existing universes would be of more use. However, a neat tool, looks easy to use and powerful.

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