Webinar - Making SAP BI Administration Exciting

Well, okay, my title may be overselling BI administration a tiny bit.

In fact, as BI topics go, administration may seem one of the least exciting. But managing administration tasks well is the first step toward enabling the pursuit of all of those other, more exciting BI topics.

Many administrative tasks can be both labor-intensive and time-sensitive, meaning that you need to throw resources at the tasks to ensure timely fulfillment of service level agreements with your information consumers.

The result is a double dose of undesirable: your resource costs go up and you don't have the resources to tackle initiatives with much higher ROI. You're paying more and getting less. You're undermining your ability to deliver progressive BI capabilities to your stakeholders, and as an unintended consequence, you're robbing them of competitive advantage.

Without a progressive approach to your BI platform, your management of administration tasks may just be increasing the technical debt in that platform, and the vicious cycle continues.

Sorry, did I say I was trying to make BI administration exciting? I meant terrifying. The truth is that most BI administration teams would prefer to live in less interesting times.

On November 2, 2017, we hosted a webinar that explores ways to automate and simplify the many time- and labor-intensive SAP BI administrative tasks faced by administrators on an ongoing and recurring basis. We looked at tips and techniques for reducing, preventing and managing the many chaotic activities, events and factors that drain your administrative resources and interfere with your ability to deliver timely BI content to your information consumers.

View this webinar on demand

Administrative difficulties arise from many causes, including the volume and complexity of content, growing user expectations, the proliferation of data sources, greater security, governance and compliance requirements, and the rise of user-driven content. None of these trends will make BI administration easier, but you can use the APOS Administrator solution to automate and simplify the most resource-intensive administrative tasks, and to liberate resources for progressive BI initiatives.

APOS Administrator Users - Did You Know?

Did you know that you can now perform a search in Instance Manager for inactive instances in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.x?

This search requires that you also have APOS Insight, as the search is based on integration between these two solutions.

Good news: If you don't have APOS Insight, you can download the free APOS Insight Elements package and use it with Instance Manager to perform these searches.

You'll find APOS Insight Elements for other tasks as well. It will allow you to:

• Inventory all objects, including report objects, user group objects, folders, categories, and business view objects
• Use object data to compare historical folder/object structures from different points in time
• Inventory all report schedules within the system
• Use schedule data to determine peak server usage as a step toward optimizing server performance
• Inventory all report instances within the system
• Use instance data to determine report usage patterns and know which reports are used the most, and which are rarely used
• Look at the processing activity for a particular time and day and compare that processing activity with other times and days to form a picture of bursts, if they exist, and to reduce processing bottlenecks
• Use inventories and analysis to initiate a systematic clean-up of your BI deployment to plan for migration, safeguard the health of your system, and prepare for growth.

Download APOS Insight Elements.

Webinar: SAP's Alexander Peter on Analysis for Office

What: What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office Webinar
When: Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2016 – 11:00 am EDT
Guest Presenter: Alexander Peter, Product Manager, SAP

SAP’s Alexander Peter joins us to discuss what’s new and what’s ahead for SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office (Analysis for Office).

If you were able to attend our SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office - Scheduling, Distributing, Managing webinar back in June, you may remember that we promised to host a session to focus on what features are coming in the near future, and what the long term plans for Analysis for Office are. This is that session, and Alexander will be here to answer your questions on all aspects of the current version of Analysis for Office, as well as on the roadmap.

SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office is the BI information analysis and delivery tool of choice for many users, both because of its capabilities and its ease of use. If your organization is looking for ways to increase both of these features of Analysis for Office, then you should definitely attend this webinar.

Many of APOS' well managed BI solutions can help you perform many Analysis for Office asks more efficiently and effectively.

• Scheduling - APOS Administrator and APOS Publisher can help you to schedule reports for personal, team and recurring reports, for large and diverse groups (including external stakeholders) to a variety of format and destination types.
• Management and Administration - APOS Administrator, APOS Storage Center and APOS Insight can help you with bulk instance management, document archive/backup/selective restore, and impact analysis.
• Using Analysis for Office as a Data Source - The APOS Data Gateway solution lets you use Analysis for Office documents as a data source for your other BI projects in, for example, SAP Design Studio or SAP Lumira. The reason this a desirable capability is that it allows you to leverage the discovery and analytical work done in Analysis for Office, and to avoid repeating the same work in other analytical and visualization applications.

You can find out more about how APOS well managed BI solutions can help get the most out of Analysis for office here, and please join Alexander and our APOS team as we explore continuous improvement of the SAP Analysis for Office offering in this informative webinar.

Register for this webinar…

New Case Study - Melbourne Water

Melbourne Water recently implemented the Object Manager module of the APOS Administrator solution.

APOS Administrator simplifies and automates:

• Security management
• Object management
• Report scheduling
• Instance management
• Structured content promotion
• Administrative user impersonation

Melbourne Water is a utility operated by the Victoria state government in Australia. It sees its mission to be "Enhancing life and livability with secure and reliable water services, desirable urban spaces and environments, and healthy waterways and bays."
They were facing numerous challenges with their SAP BusinessObjects deployment, including:

• Consolidating numerous data sources
• Updating Crystal Reports objects to the new consolidated data source
• Implementing SAP BusinessObjects Data Services
• Designing universes to facilitate adoption of Web Intelligence for self-serve BI
• Creating an inventory of all reports in the system to enable cleanup
• Simplifying and codifying BI platform administration processes

This case study documents how Melbourne Water used APOS Object Manager to address these challenges.
Read the case study...

SAP BusinessObjects Migration with APOS Administrator

APOS Administrator automates and simplifies object, instance, and schedule management. During migration, reports are typically relocated. Use APOS Administrator to save, import, batch modify, and export schedules.

You can:

• Adapt the migrated source system to the new environment using bulk operations on a large number of system objects (reports, folders, users, security, settings, etc.).
• Import schedules from the legacy system, then map and export them to the new system.
• Analyze an entire report instance environment at once.
• Apply actions to instances in bulk.
• Establish control over migrated instances/schedules.
• Modify recurring schedules.
• Manage scheduling crises quickly and efficiently.
• Manage objects in bulk.
• Perform sophisticated deployment of reports and documents to the system.
• Promote objects from development/testing to production efficiently and in compliance with data security and privacy requirements.
• Control security to the various objects.
• Perform common maintenance of Users and Groups, simplifying the onerous task of setting advanced security rights.

APOS Administrator provides administrative capabilities that simplify, complement and enhance SAP BusinessObjects object and document instance management and scheduling features. In the hands of platform managers, BI technicians and other power users, APOS Administrator makes SAP BusinessObjects more responsive to enterprise information needs.

APOS Administrator saves valuable administrative time through automation and task streamlining, reducing human error, and providing the agility and flexibility to meet the changing needs of information consumers. Whether you're managing or re-engineering business processes, establishing crisis management or disaster recovery procedures, or preparing for migration to a newer version of SAP BusinessObjects, APOS Administrator creates value through operational efficiencies, establishing trust through reliability.

US Military Logistics, Well Managed BI

A recent notice published at FedBizOpps.gov declared that the US Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), has renewed its maintenance contract with APOS Systems for the APOS Administrator (InfoScheduler) solution.

The mission (PDF) of the Air Force Materiel Command:

We deliver war-winning expeditionary capabilities to the warfighter through development and transition of technology, professional acquisition management, exacting test and evaluation, and world-class sustainment of all Air Force weapon systems.

AFMC's management and delivery of information is mission critical in the extreme. Lives and national security are at stake, and it is gratifying for us to know that they use our solution to improve the efficiency of their BI platform and the timeliness of information delivery.

But this story is not just about doing the job well. AFMC's use of APOS Administrator also aligns with the Command's recent efforts to streamline their operations for greater efficiency, higher ROI, and lower costs.

As those of you who have been following the well managed BI saga know, APOS solutions are built to help business intelligence platform managers, administrators and technologists make more efficient use of their BI platform. Well managed BI is a quest to climb the capability maturity model (CMM) for BI platform management. The CMM has three levels:

• If you are at the Curative level of the model, your are constantly reacting to system events and information consumer issues. You are in firefighting mode.
•  If you are at the Preventive level, you are actively seeking out and correcting problems before they affect your information consumers.
• If you are at the Progressive level, you are proactively seeking new opportunities to expand the use and ROI of your BI platform for the benefit of different business units.

The Air Force Materiel Command's commitment to the APOS Administrator solution validates our belief that well managed BI is a critical component in any organization's quest to fulfill its core mission.

Learn more about well managed BI. Download the Well Managed BI: Managing Your BI Platform for ROI white paper.

Product Pipeline: APOS Administrator

Announcements from the APOS Development team on new APOS Administrator features:

• Object manager now tracks the server name from the data source and presents this information in the Object manager grid as an optional column.
• Instance Manager now lets you select successful finished instances and move them or copy them to a different parent. Any successful finished instances can be reused in other schedules as long as they are in a RPT, WID or REP format. They can also be a folder for DOC, XLS, PDF, TXT, and RTF.
• Instance Manager now streamlines the instance deletion process. You can upload a list of failed, unused or out-of-date instances and delete them in bulk.

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