Collaborate Thoughts

Sorry I have been so busy and not able to post a play-by-play account of Collaborate. My friend Edward Roske did manage to post often from Collaborate and I recommend you read his comments at http://looksmarter.blogspot.com/. I don't know how he kept up; he must have been blogging the entire time he wasn't presenting..

As for my overall impression.. It does seem to me, and to others I talked with, like this is the replacement for the Hyperion Solutions conferences of the past. It did seem a bit light on 'how customer A implemented Hyperion product XYZ' types of presentations but hopefully there will be more submissions in future years. Edward Roske and Tracy McMullen from interRel did many, many presentations; they did invest a bunch of time in submitting/writing many of the presentations. The best presentation I saw was, however, a non-technical presentation by John Scott of interRel about the good, bad and ugly of budget and forecasting systems. John used to be the Global Domain Lead for Hyperion Planning and talked not only about how budgets can be good, but also on how they can lead to 'bad' behavior such as causing people to protect their budget dollars even when the business could be optimized by a lower budget..

The OAUG SIG meeting was interesting; Edward wrote about many of the details but there is one thing I wanted to point out about the benefits of SIG membership. Oracle E-Business Suites customers were facing a deadline on upgrading a specific version before it went to 'Sustaining Support' which is the lowest level on their support matrix; the SIG convinced Oracle to extend that support by (at-least) one year. The lesson? Those of you on Essbase 7X may want to join the OAUG SIG 'in-force' and together work to make sure 7X does not go to 'Sustaining Support'.

On the Essbase roadmap topic, there was an excellent presentation made by Aneel Shenker; he was gracious enough to give me a copy of the slides and I will post a my thoughts of the new features coming in Essbase 11.1.1, formerly known as "Kennedy" and "Essbase 9.5" next week. That being said, if you want to know the real scoop on this release, the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference in New Orleans will dedicate the entire day Sunday, June 15, to the topic and will feature the Hyperion developers who wrote the product and know it through and through. I encourage you all to register for this conference soon as there is limited space available. Information on this conference is at http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/hyperion.html.

Advanced Security Manager Update - Call for testers

There was a comment on one of my earlier posts asking the status of the Advanced Security Manager. My developer is still working on the code although it is not on the top of his priority list. After a brief discussion, it appears the code changes, as requested by the OLAP Underground team as a condition for releasing the code, is complete and he has been working on properly commenting the code. I have directed him to make sure our automated build processes for ASM are in place and, once that is done, I would like to have some users start testing. If you are interested in testing the ASM, please drop me an email at timtow@appliedolap.com; it will probably be a week or two before I get anything out.

I also intended to blog 'real-time' about the Collaborate conference. Unfortunately, I didn't even have time to eat most of the time I was there. I will try to post something soon (after a few Dodeca installs this week, reviewing a couple of patent filings, doing a bunch of followup calls, etc).

Collaborate - OAUG Hyperion SIG Meeting

I am leaving this afternoon to attend Collaborate. Actually, that isn't quite true as I am skiing in Vail tomorrow before heading back to Denver for Collaborate. In any case, I was asked to help spread the work about the Hyperion Special Interest Group meeting on Sunday afternoon. I will be there as I have been asked to serve as a 'Domain Lead' for Essbase (along with my friend Edward Roske). Here is the agenda:

• 1:00 – 1:15 OAUG Hyperion SIG Welcome and Introductions


• SIG Board members
  
• Domain Leads
  
• Web Cast Series


• 1:15 – 2:15 Oracle Key Note Speaker: Fred Richards, Oracle – Senior Director, BI Product Marketing


• 2:15 – 2:30 OAUG Board Member Speaker: Ray Payne, OAUG - Vice President, Global Outreach & Transition


• 2:30 – 2:45 Collaborate Hyperion Presentations Overview


• 2:45 – 3:15 SIG website overview and Q& A for ideas


• 3:15 – 4:15 Cocktail & Appetizer Reception

Anyone attending Collaborate who is interested in Hyperion technology is invited to attend. I hope to see you there.