Webinar: a Complete BI Publishing Solution

Webinar: Execute tightly controlled document production, publishing and distribution workflows with APOS Publisher.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 10 a.m. / 4 p.m. EDT.

If your SAP BusinessObjects deployment is well managed, it presents a single, consistent view of your corporate data, regardless of the number of datasources it joins. If this is the case, then your BI platform should also be your primary publishing platform for enterprise information.

But using your BI platform in this way may require you to overcome some major challenges, including:

• The growing volume, variety and complexity of enterprise document publishing
• Migration of legacy system functions to the BI system
• The need to monitor mission-critical processes closely, and manage proactively
• The need for flexibility and agility to address new line-of-business requirements

APOS Publisher is an essential solution for organizations that have complex SAP BusinessObjects distribution requirements with multiple report format and destination types.

For such organizations, APOS Publisher is a complete SAP BusinessObjects publishing solution, including robust bursting management, post-processing distribution service, report package management, and assured delivery to extend SAP BusinessObjects' capabilities.

APOS Publisher achieves advanced SAP BusinessObjects publishing through:

• An advanced bursting engine
• Automated document production
• Workflow monitoring, alerts and auditing
• Interactive process control
• Assured delivery, auto recovery, & partial burst reruns
• Enhanced distribution, encryption & integration

Learn how APOS can help you execute tightly controlled document production, publishing and distribution workflows for your enterprise. Register for this webinar.

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BI Publishing and the CFO

Linda Tucci of SearchCIO-Midmarket tells the story of a CFO taking the lead on business intelligence strategy. What drove the CFO to get involved? Was it quality of information? Was it the price of the solution? Total cost of ownership?

No. It was the fact that the company was going through reams of paper on a daily basis. Their staff were manually sorting, collating, troubleshooting and distributing reports. CFO Gary Petrangelo:

"The larger the size of the department, the bigger the report. Our mailing department could have 200 pages to page through if a discrepancy showed up in the bottom line," Petrangelo said... "To me it just seemed senseless, with all the technology we have. We should be able to generate that in electronic format," Petrangelo said.

What drove the CFO to get involved was the company's outdated and unwieldy process of generating, distributing and accessing business intelligence -- in a word: Publishing. The publishing capabilities of their legacy BI system were not scalable and extensible enough to meet their growing needs.

This anecdotal evidence agrees with our experience selling the APOS Publisher solution: the growing demands on the BI system, the complexities of those demands, and the migration of line-of-business functions to the BI platform call for an end-to-end, integrated, scalable and extensible BI publishing solution.

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Webinar Reminder: Publishing for SAP BusinessObjects

Thousands of organizations rely on the SAP BusinessObjects platform to connect their information consumers with the business intelligence content they need for effective decision-making. The business intelligence publishing process is of critical importance to these organizations. They require flawless generation and timely delivery of reports, and secure access for information consumers.

Is your publishing process growing more and more complex and consuming more and more of your administrative resources? Find out how report generation, distribution, and access can be planned, automated, executed and monitored from within a single integrated solution.

The APOS Publisher Solution provides the agility, flexibility and security to meet complex BI publishing requirements. APOS Publisher complements the inherent strengths of SAP BusinessObjects, and brings end-to-end monitoring and control to your output management process.

Please join us for this 45-minute webinar to learn more about:

• Complementing SAP Publishing with APOS Publisher
• Understanding the content lifecycle
• Automating bursting and scheduling
• Proactively managinge the full publishing process
• Getting more from your BI system - total output management

Have you missed an important webinar? Download recent webinars and white papers here.
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Beyond Bursting: the Future of BI Publishing

Publishing has some very specific connotations in the business intelligence world. To some, BI publishing is just report printing, but this description does not do justice to the many subtleties and complexities of BI publishing. As BI becomes more pervasive within organizations, the needs of information consumers increase and grow more complex, and so do the information delivery requirements.

BI publishing is more than just bursting now. It has become a much larger topic within today's enterprise. An end-to-end BI publishing solution should not only meet today's information requirements, but also lay the groundwork for the future of enterprise information generation, delivery, and secure access.

Let's look at BI publishing at the conceptual level. The objective of an end-to-end BI publishing solution is to get the right content to the right information consumer, at the right time, in the right format, and with the right level of security. The solution has to generate the content, distribute it, and provide (secure) access to it. And to ensure that all of these things happen according to plan, the solution must have an administrative layer that assures delivery and provides remedial capabilities.

A BI publishing solution that does all of these things well should be of interest to a variety of people within an enterprise:

• BI administrators need to know that tasks have executed as scheduled, and they need to be able to validate reception of documents by information consumers. But knowing is not enough: they also need clear remedial courses of action to administer publishing processes proactively.
• BI Platform managers need a BI publishing solution that is both scalable and extensible. Scalable, because they know that publishing needs will continue to grow as the demand for BI becomes more pervasive throughout the organization. Extensible, because line-of-business managers will continue to ask them for more enterprise publishing functionality. Knowing they have a robust BI publishing system gives platform managers the confidence they need to offer new enterprise publishing solutions.
• Line-of-business managers need to optimize the flow of information within their business units and look for new ways to create competitive advantage. An end-to-end BI publishing solution goes beyond the generation and delivery of internal documents. As the use of BI publishing becomes more customer-facing, it becomes a key line-of-business tool, and the more line-of-business managers get from a BI publishing solution, the more they will demand.
• CIOs and other C-level executives are looking for cost-effective ways to modernize legacy information systems. Many internal and customer-facing document generation and delivery applications reside on aging IT infrastructure. C-level executives are looking to leverage their BI investment to assume many of these legacy functions.

Have you missed an important webinar? Download recent webinars here.

APOS Publisher: A Complete Publishing Solution for SAP BusinessObjects

The publishing process in SAP BusinessObjects is critical to effective and pervasive business intelligence. You may have high-quality information within your BI system, but it's all for nothing if that information doesn't reach the decision makers in your organization in a timely and secure manner.

Publishing may be invisible to your information consumers, but if you are a platform manager or technician, it is critical that you understand and manage the publishing process to deliver high-quality, timely reports.

What's involved in the generation, distribution and accessibility of your SAP BusinessObjects reports? And how does the APOS Publisher Solution make it easier for you to configure and manage the publishing process?

The APOS Publisher Solution is a complete publishing solution for SAP BusinessObjects, the business intelligence solution that thousands of organizations around the world rely on to connect their information consumers with the analytics they need for effective decision making.

What makes APOS Publisher the best choice for publishing SAP BusinessObjects reports? Publisher not only automates a large part of your publishing process, but also provides the flexibility to manage the process of generating tailored documents and delivering them to stakeholders throughout the enterprise, and beyond.

Bursting & Consolidation: Generating the Right Content for the Right People

The APOS Publisher Bursting module enables a seamless, secure, automated and data-driven publishing process. "Multi-pass" bursting lets you run large numbers of schedules that have been personalized in APOS Publisher.

Alternatively, you can gain even more flexibility by using Publisher's "single-pass" bursting, which creates a single large instance for post-processing by the APOS Distribution Server module. In both scenarios, bursting is an automated process.

If you are distributing multiple documents to the same recipients, use APOS Publisher to consolidate the reports into a single report package for ease of consumption and simplified monitoring and management.

APOS Publisher Bursting achieves a high degree of automation through bursting definitions that are tied directly to your SAP BusinessObjects system. The bursting process adjusts automatically to user changes in your BI system.

Distribution: The Who, When & How of Delivery

Every organization's report delivery needs are unique and frequently complex. Format, security, delivery location -- all of these factors are key to satisfying the needs of business process workflows, and the needs of all business units and the information consumers within them.

The APOS Publisher Solution's Distribution module provides additional post-processing, such as adding encryption and other special export options and destinations. Publisher uses regular SAP BusinessObjects scheduling functionality, but adds extra settings and custom properties to achieve more distribution flexibility. With Publisher, you can distribute your reports to multiple destinations simultaneously, including:

• Printer (multiple simultaneously)
• Network file location
• Email as attachment
• Email as content
• FTP
• SFTP

Publisher's Distribution functionality is also the gateway to integration with your content management system.

APOS Publisher & Content Fusion: Accessibility

Is it time for your organization's information systems to work together? Do you have both a business intelligence system to gather and analyze mission-critical data, and a content management system to help with collaborative processes? Optimizing the flow of information means fusing these systems together.

APOS Publisher provides all of the automation, security, and accessibility you need to publish your SAP BusinessObjects reports successfully. However, as the need for business intelligence within your organization becomes more pervasive, you may want to consider even wider accessibility.

The Content Fusion module is a natural extension to APOS Publisher. Content Fusion uses plug-ins to perform "active archiving" within content management systems such as Open Text (9.7.1 or 10) and Microsoft SharePoint (2003, 2007, 2010). You can attach your SAP BusinessObjects reports to your content management workflows to create complete intelligence packages. Attached reports include metadata such as source, parameters, ownership, and other lineage information.

The Big Picture

The APOS Publisher Solution covers the SAP BusinessObjects content lifecycle from start to finish, and it integrates seamlessly with the entire suite of APOS solutions, all designed to help you get the most out of your SAP BusinessObjects deployment.

What Is Well Managed BI?

The whole point to implementing a business intelligence system is to improve operational efficiencies within your organization by delivering timely, accurate and relevant information to all stakeholders and decision makers. BI systems extract the most relevant information from your mission-critical systems and deliver it as actionable information to the people who need it.

You use business BI to judge the health of your enterprise, and to decide on appropriate courses of action. Your BI system monitors your Enterprise solutions, but how do you monitor your BI system to ensure the information being delivered is timely and accurate?

Well managed BI:

• Ensures that you have the Insight into your system to know that it is working within established parameters;
• Notifies an Administrator when the system is not functioning within those parameters, and provides the means for quick and easy remedial action;
• Enables Pervasive Distribution of personalized reports across the Enterprise; 
• Uses data visualization technology such as Location Intelligence to gain greater speed to insight; and
• Makes regulatory compliance easy through Storage capabilities that archive documents securely and enable selective restore. 

These are some of the subjects I hope to discuss on this blog.

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