Insights & news
Recently, I received the following requirement from a customer: To hide the “Select (All)” value that WebIntelligence places by default in the Input Controls.
Before the SAP BusinessObjects BI4.1 SP4 version, there was no way to hide that line. However, SAP has finally addressed the topic with an BuisnessObjects enhancement and now it is possible to disable it in the Properties of the Input Control.
In order to distribute content of SAP BI BusinessObjects, there are currently several automated options, including send to Inbox, FTP, default location and e-mail.
Regarding the send to e-mail feature, sometimes it is easy to configure — that is the case of big corporations that have their own accounts set up within their domain and unlimited power to administer them — but sometimes it’s not that easy and it involves extra cost.
A alternative way of configuring the send to e-mail feature is by using a Gmail account, which is explained in this article.
When trying to upgrade your SAP BusinessObjects (BO) Business Intelligence (BI) Platform from XI3.1 to 4.0 or greater and migrate your Windows AD Users and Groups, you will notice that they were migrated with Copy (1) in their name.
The resolution provided by SAP in this case is to manually rename the Users and Groups.
This is fine if you have up to 50 objects to rename; but in general this is not the case, so you will want an automated solution (unless you want to waste some good hours).
Now the question is: How you can create an automated solution? There is a simple answer: by taking advantage of the Platform SDK.
Recently, we upgraded Tableau from version 8.0 (32 Bits) to 8.1.7 (64 Bits) along with Automatic Login (Single Sign On) and PostgreSQL configuration (Access to the Tableau system Database). After the successful upgrade of this application and configuration of the named features, I would like to share my experience as they may be useful in case you face a similar situation.
Data mining, as per definition, is a discipline whose main aim is to discover patterns and most importantly, to predict and gain more knowledge on your data. This is done by combining different methods and approaches from artificial intelligence and statistics disciplines. One of the most common problems is how to build accurate and optimal classifier that given raw data helps us to build a model to classify future cases. There are many algorithms and methods available and we will refer in this blog article to the C4.5 which is available in the SAP Predictive Analytics tool. SAP Predictive analytics (SAP Infinite Insight) provides data mining capabilities that help many companies to anticipate customer behaviors and demands.
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is the ETL (Extract, Transformation and Load) tool in the Microsoft Business Intelligence suite. Microsoft changed the way they handle data loads completely with the introduction of SQL Server 2005, offering complete ETL functionality as opposed to mainly Extract and Load functionality available in earlier versions. The release of SQL Server 2012 introduced another significant improvement on previous versions, providing a new way of configuring packages for deployment. Once development of packages has been completed, the challenge is to deploy those packages from a development environment to test or production environment without having to manually reconfigure them for the new environment. Configuring packages in SSIS has not always been very easy. A main problem was the different possibilities that developers had, including XML configuration files, Environment variables, Registry entries, Parent package variables and SQL Server configurations.
These days almost every company store data such as users, emails, roles, printers, etc. in what it is call a Directory Service, providing a centralized access to company-related data that can be use across all its systems. One of the most widely used solution is Active Directory from Microsoft, since its tightly integrated with Windows OS systems. The other one LDAP, which stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, has a broad range of users too since the de facto standard in Linux-based systems.
Given the fierce competition and the ever-soaring demands of customers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) today need to invest in having BI capabilities to stay relevant and meet these demands. Yet, with scarce resources available, the alignment of business and IT is vital to ensure success, and new options for hosted BI solutions freeing up cash flow are attractive options for SMEs.
