I attended the Business Technology Summit in Bangalore last week – 3rd and 4th November. There were 3 tracks on cloud computing, Service Oriented Architecture and Business Intelligence, and I chose a mix of sessions across each.
**Overall impression:**The BT Summit was heavily focused on cloud computing with half of second day having a deep dive into Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering, and several keynotes. SOA and web services, REST and similar architectural sessions were interspersed but definitely not a first-class citizen.
With BO XI 3.1 SP2 out in July this year, it is probably time to make a trip down the years to find out how the XI platform has evolved and matured.
The timeline:
XI R2 SP2 - service pack release in March 2007 with productivity pack - QaaWS and LiveOffice connectors XI 3.0 - new major release in February 2008 - the first release after SAP acquired BOBJ in October 2007 XI 3.
While developing a Business Objects security model, you need to focus on the different types of security:
Functional Security - this would govern access to specific application features, e.g. editing reports, drilling down, ability to schedule reports etc. Data Security - this governs access to specific data - rows or columns or cells as per authorization Infrastructure Security - governs physical and electronic access to systems The infrastructure security is the first to be designed.
Desktop search has become an important component of our everyday work.
With the amount of information explosion, it is only natural that users and enterprises move towards enabling desktop (and enterprise) search for users – subject of course to appropriate security and access controls. BI vendors have moved into this new business space that has opened up and seems to be one of the most promising. While Business Objects had announced support for the Google Search appliance and Google Desktop back in 2006, their most important announcement lately has been the launch of the Business Objects Explorer (formerly known as Polestar) product.
Having relocated from the Silicon Valley to Bangalore a year back, I’m now working in an MIS – strategic reporting role. In my role to evangelize the use of BI best practices and tools, one of the foremost is that of universe design. As a matter of fact, I’m currently being involved in formalizing a BI policy around the tools we use most – Oracle, Informatica and SAP Business Objects (along with migration from our legacy BO to the XI platform!
