Open World Monday

Well, I was going to do my write-up last night but I've been getting over the flu and after a looooong day bed sounded better than writing.

I started the day off with some personal business so I missed the keynote. I'm not really heartbroken over that. When I got to the conference, It was in time for about 30 minutes of looking at booths. Very impressive, but I didn't sign up for anything, didn't get any of the junk they were giving away and didn't play any of the games they were enticing me with. I guess I'm getting old.

Although I'm an Oracle Ace, I decided to attend the "So you want to be an Oracle Ace" presentation at 11:30. I wanted to figure out what I'm actually supposed to be doing as one. Due to some mix-up on my part, I was late and didn't hear the first part of the presentation. I'm sorry for the presenters as the room was almost empty with about 20 people there. When I walked in. there on the screen was a quote attributed to me in a survey the presenter had sent out to all the ACES. Wow, I'm being quoted now. Too bad there were so few in the room to see it. The main theme of the presentation is that Oracle Aces don't need to know a ton, but have to have the attitude of wanting to help others. Doing this through Blogs, forum, articles are all ways to get noticed. They said that most Aces didn't try to become Aces, they just helped others and one day someone called them and told them they were an Ace.

After this session was lunch. They had a few choices, I ended up with a chicken caesar salad. Nothing to write home (or blog about) but it filled the void.

The next session I attended was the Oracle BI Roadmap and Strategy presented by Paul Rodwick. While many things he said echoed what I had heard from John Kopke on Sunday, he did go over other things. Some things I found interesting. The next release of OBIEE 10.1.3.4 will include a sample apps section that has 20 dashboards which are what Oracle considers the best practices of what a company should be looking at. There is Iphone support including approvals which is write back from the phone to an application.
He talked about what are strategic applications, these included Hyperion Planning, HFM, Oracle Integrated operational planning (combines financial and operational plans), predictive reporting (crystal ball)and Essbase.
He talked about fully functional prepackaged BI applications that will be fully functional out of the box .Trying to put me out of work I guess, but good for companies who can’t afford custom solutions.
He then talked about the next release 11G which has a list of over 140 enhancements, A few of the things he covered were a New OBIEE start page that is personalized, Answers + which is optimized for Essbase but still fully functional for an array of products. Paul talked about OBIEE having write back ability thus turning reports into forms. He talked about a lit more I forgot to write down. As he wound down, he went over a quick list of other products he had not talked about before and then said that none of them are going away. Oracle will support them and as you want to migrate from one product to another, there will be migration tools available (but you don’t have to migrate unless you want to).

I’ll be a little less verbose about the next two sessions. Both were on Planning The first was what’s new and coming. The highlights from that session were:
Attaching documents to forms, Member formulas on forms, Calendar based date selection. Run time prompt improvement (yeah), hiding and showing missing/zero rows. Administrative changes include: security to folders, support for all attribute dimension types, and a wizard for data sources.
The presenter (Guillaume Armaud) went over changes to associated products. For example, Calculation Manager which will replace HBR can turn existing calc scripts more graphical and is web based.
EPMA 11.1.1 which will work with 9.3.1 is fully functional now.
In Planning 11.1.2 they are including Public Sector Budgeting, Sources to EBS and SAP, Excel and Office based planning, Web UI and data form improvements and even more improvements to Calc Manager and Life cycle management. There was some talk of ASO with Planning as well.

Next was Planning Tips and Tricks. By Stephane Tibault. He is very knowledgeable about Planning, but was VERY hard to understand. Because of it and being very tired I have to admit, I nodded off during the presentation. While I was coherent, He talked about Essbase optimizations, Dense and sparse settings, switching outline order between calculations and retrievals. After that, rather than talk about tips, he seemed to go off more on talking about features of the new release and demo how to turn them on. I guess those are tips, but I what I was thinking of.

With the sessions over for me for the day, I had weaseled and invitation to a reception hosted by interRel, Star Analytics and Applied Olap. I’m grateful for them allowing me to drink their booze and eat their food. Look up these companies if you need help, they are all good companies with nice people. I hate to say it, but they had a drawing and I won a Ipod shuffle. I think they would have preferred it to go to a client. Sorry guys. Edward talks more about the reception on his blog, so I won’t bore you with the details, But I had a nice time talking to old friends I saw there.

Well I’m off to OW for another exciting day (alas my last as some of us have to work for a living) but I’ll let you know how it goes