Customer Success – Santa Clara County SSA

The County of Santa Clara's Social Services Agency (SSA) services 15 incorporated cities in the most populous county of the San Francisco Bay area, which is home to California's Silicon Valley. The SSA uses SAP BusinessObjects as its reporting engine, and relies on it to meet regulatory requirements for it documents of record.

Santa Clara County SSA’s Challenge

In preparation for an impending migration, the SSA needed an inventory and deep knowledge of their SAP BI system, how their reports were being used, and how those reports would be impacted. While taking steps to streamline their content migration, the SSA also had concerns about maintaining their documents of record and audit readiness.

Santa Clara County SSA implemented APOS Insight and APOS Storage Center

• Impact AnalysisThe SSA implemented APOS Insight to achieve awareness of reports, object usage and security profiles, and to understand the downstream impact of data modelling changes on reports.
• Migration ReadinessThe SSA used APOS Insight to inventory and analyze their SAP BI system content and usage. APOS Storage Center automation enabled system right-sizing and migration streamlining.
• Content RegulationThe SSA used APOS Storage Center to implement a content storage strategy that met their stringent regulatory requirements, safeguarded their content, and maintained audit readiness.

Feedback

Thinh Hong, Information System Manager at SSA Santa Clara County:

APOS Insight's impact analysis capabilities allow us to see what effect changes to our data model will have downstream. It has allowed us to analyze SAP BusinessObjects metadata effectively. APOS Storage Center provides us with an efficient, rules-based means of cleaning up our BI environment, and the ease with which it allows us to back up and selectively restore objects has been very useful.

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…

Case Study: Social Services Agency, Santa Clara County

The Social Services Agency (SSA) of Santa Clara County, CA, spoke to us recently about their experience with our APOS Storage Center and APOS Insight solutions.

The SSA's 600-plus BI accounts currently use Desktop Intelligence and Web Intelligence as their primary report delivery media. At the time of writing, the SSA was in the process of planning its migration to BI 4, so investigation of and preparation for the inevitable full adoption of Web Intelligence was also under way. More recently, the BI team has been delivering BI to the agency's information consumers via SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius).

In 2011, after receiving recommendations from peers at an SAP BusinessObjects conference, SSA implemented APOS Storage Center. SSA needed a strategy and solution for backing up, archiving, and selectively restoring reports. Aside from needing to implement a reliable backup solution, they wanted to optimize system performance and have the means to comply quickly and easily with regulatory requirements through selective restore.

In 2013, as SSA was preparing for their migration to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4, they were looking for a means of doing an inventory and forming a complete understanding of their BI system and what is currently being used. Their positive experience with APOS led them to contact APOS again.

Thinh Hong, Information Systems Manager with SSA, summed up her experiences with these APOS solutions:

APOS Storage Center provides us with an efficient, rules-based means of cleaning up our BI environment, and the ease with which it allows us to back up and selectively restore objects has been very useful. We can archive and retrieve historical instances in a neutral format, which is important, because we maintain a five-year window on instances for regulatory compliance.

…

APOS Insight's impact analysis capabilities allow us to see what effect changes to our data model will have downstream. It has allowed us to analyze SAP BusinessObjects metadata effectively. The information we've gathered through Insight has been very useful in helping us to manage and troubleshoot our BI environment. We will be using APOS Insight to compare environments pre- and post-migration to benchmark performance and to ensure security has translated to the new system properly, and to build a list of reports for conversion from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence.

Read the complete case study.

New: Xcelsius Activity Logging with APOS Insight

APOS Insight for SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and BI 4.x now has Xcelsius Activity Logging capabilities.

We've been hearing for some time from platform managers and dashboard designers that they need better ways to understand how their dashboards are being used so that they can improve their dashboards, and thus improve service to their users. As a result, we've added Xcelsius Activity Logging capabilities to APOS Insight.

While native Xcelsius logging (i.e., basic information such as who opened a dashboard and how long they used it) may be adequate for normal day-to-day operations, organizations that want to be proactive in their development and evolution of dashboards need more information. APOS Insight lets you ask much more specific questions about how your dashboards are being used.

The APOS Insight Xcelsius Activity Logging feature uses an add-on to Xcelsius (or Dashboards 4) to configure real-time logging of Xcelsius user activity to the Insight database. To configure logging, you bind the APOS logging control to cells in the spreadsheet that represent property name and value pairs. When a value changes it is logged to the database.

For example, if you want to know which tabs dashboard users are viewing or not viewing, you could bind the APOS Xcelsius Logging control to cells that control tab visibility. Using this and similar types of information for a group of users, developers, administrators and managers can judge how a dashboard is being used, and thus how effective the design of the dashboard is.

APOS Insight Baseline Scan

APOS Insight is our enhanced audit and metadata management solution for SAP BusinessObjects. During today's Well Managed Migration webinar, Blair Pzytula noted that APOS offers a service based on APOS Insight called the APOS Insight Baseline Scan. 

The APOS Insight Baseline Scan uses Insight's incomparable audit and metadata management capabilities to identify the objects in your system (Crystal Reports, Webis, Deskis, Universes, Folders) and their structures and dependencies. This information is invaluable for planning migration, or even for system sizing excercises.

The Baseline Scan is offered as a free, limited service to qualified customers. if you want to know whether you qualify, contact your APOS Account Manager.

 

SAP BusinessObjects Migration with APOS Insight

The APOS suite of well managed BI solutions simplify, automate and complement many SAP BusinessObjects management and administrative tasks. They enhance system visibility and increase your control over BI content. Because they help you optimize your BI system, they are also extremely useful during all phases of your SAP BusinessObjects BI4.0 migration.

APOS Insight provides a complete snapshot of what is happening at any given time within your system, meaning that you can analyze system usage and bottlenecks over time as a preliminary step in planning your new implementation. You can:

• Populate a database with point-in-time snapshots of system status
• Extract benchmark information about your system before the migration, then after the migration, and compare them.
• Run comparison reports/queries of what has changed.
• See where reports have moved to in the new deployment.
• Map IDs in one system to IDs in the other.
• Compare the security structures between the two environments to ensure groups are in place, users are in groups and all are properly permissioned, thus eliminating security holes.

Once you have deployed the new version of SAP BusinessObjects, APOS Insight continues to provide high value with enhanced metadata management, audit, and monitoring capabilities.

Product Pipeline: APOS Insight

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

• The KPI "Report Extended Info" service now logs all tables accessed by reports to a separate table in the database, so that you can analyze table usage in relation to reports.
• KPI now caches passwords to access report SQL statements when offline.
• KPI now sends email notifications when KPI scans are complete.
• RealTime Monitor for SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 now supports IBM DB2.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

Product Pipeline: APOS Insight 2011-04

Announcing improvements to APOS Insight, our SAP BusinessObjects system introspection solution:

• Insight can now extract SAP BusinessObjects Audit data, de-normalize it, and write it to topical tables within the APOS KPI database for easier access, analysis and reporting.
• Insight can now monitor publication schedules within SAP BusinessObjects and notify administrators should any schedule fail.

These new features greatly improve your ability to manage SAP BusinessObjects proactively.