InterRel News and news from down under

Typically I don’t blog about the company I work for, devoting my time to more technical articles, but I decided to deviate a little today to talk about a couple of things.

First, after a long time interRel has a new website. It looks pretty nice.Check it out at  www.interrel.com. I think it is nicer looking and more informative than our old site.

Second, interRel is hiring. If you have experience in the Hyperion line of products or OBIEE and are looking for a cool consulting firm to work for, we could be interested in you. interRel is a great company to work for and we believe in consultant growth and training as importantly as we believe in customer service. I’m not going to give you the marketing on why you should join interRel, you probably already know. If you have an interest in talking to us, email info@interrel.com

finally , some news not associated to interRel in any way.  If you plan to be in New Zealand or Australia next month, why not attend ODTUG’s Seriously Practical Conference in Melbourne March 21st and 22nd or the  NZOUG conference on March 18th and 19th at Te Papa, Wellington (sounds like a kind of steak to me). Sounds like a great way to get a paid vacation, Go to the conference and see the countryside. This is truly not associated with interRel as we will will not be speaking at either conference, but my friend, mmip, Cameron Lackpour put together the EPM agenda for both conferences and will be speaking there. If you are there, tell him Glenn said to say Hi. That is the secret phrase and he might have a present for you (not really, It would just be fun).

Smart View Compatibility

I have been speaking at a lot of conferences and client events over the last year touting the great new features of the new version of Smart View. As a matter of fact, I’m repeating the session on Feb 16th and 18th in  interRel Webinars. (contact dwhite@interrel.com  for more info) The questions I often get are “What do I need to upgrade to get functionality” and “If I just upgrade Smart View what functionality do I still get?” 

Before I answer thos questions I’ll first answer “What version of Smart View should you upgrade to?” Since Smart View is pretty backward compatible I would upgrade to the latest version 11.1.2.2.310. This is a patch that was released last Monday and includes connectivity to OBIEE or as many Oracle people now call it BIFS (Business Intelligence Foundation Suite). Note, you must be on OBIEE 11.1.1.7 for the connectivity to work. There are a number of other enhancements and bug fixes to this version.

Next, what you you have to upgrade to get full connectivity? Well, for Smart View itself, you should be on 11.1.2.1.102 (or higher) as well as APS and Essbase 11.1.2.1.102 or higher. If you are going the patch route or 11.1.2.1 then I would recommend you get the Smart View patch 11.1.2.1.103 and APS and Essbase patches 11.1.2.1.104. Of course , you are even better if you upgrade to 11.1.2.2.310.

Finally, If you just upgrade Smart View without upgrading APS or Essbase, the functionality you can expect to get (Thank you Smart View development team for this list) is:

• Ribbon specific to Provider
• Re-designed Options Dialog
• Smart View Panel
• Sheet level Options
• Retain Excel Formatting
• Improved Function Builder
• Fix Links (Removes path references in cells with Smart View functions) Before: “=D:\Oracle\Smartview\bin\hstbar.xla’HSGETVALUE(…..
• After: =HSGETVALUE(...
• Performance Improvements

So while you won’t get cool things like multiple grids on a sheet or member name and alias, you get a few perks. The sheet level options are one thing that was missing in prior versions of Smart View that I’m glad got put in.

If you upgrade to at least 11.1.2.2 you also get an awesome new Smart Query tool that enables you to create extremely complex queries that return sets of members/numbers which can be combined and saved. It is fantastic feature that is not getting the press it deserves. In a future post, I‘ll go through a detailed example so you can see its power.