New to BO... Info Request

[cottontop]

Hi Everyone!

My company is purchasing BO and I would like any info you may offer (best books to buy, pdf, manuals, etc) that I can get my hands on to know as much about it, in the shortest amount of time.

Also, it seems to me (from reading these threads,) a strong understanding of SQL benefits a BO user. True/False? What should I become proficient in to become an expert?

Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions, but I think you know where I'm coming from, where I want to go.

Thanks! Looking forward to participating in this forum.

Cottontop

 

[jimbopalmer]

In my company, we have 3 roles, one with 3 sub types

Supervisor: Clerical position within IS that manages users. (only Accountants, Payroll and Human Resources even need passwords here)

Designer: Technical Position within IS that defines objects and relations, this is greatly sped up if you have an existing set of user requests, as future desires are often similar to past desires.

User: Non IS position that builds ad runs reports of interest to the department the user works in.

Users come in three experience levels, our superusers can view but not save universes, can read SQL to see errors in the automatic generator, and can modify free hand SQL reports. Superusers make most requests for new Objects and typically can find the underlying Database names of columns and tables from the applications

Most users just write reports without worring about the underlying code. In general one starts here and moves to another category as needed.

Some users are only allowed to run reports, not write them

If you aspire to a superuser position in your firm then I encourage you to read the SQL your reports generate, so you can look for oddities. I hope your IS folks consider giving you read only Designer access (they just forbid you save and export in Designer using the supervisor module) when you begin to feel comfortable with those tools then free hand SQL may be the final step.




I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[nimmy99]

Hi,

If you purchase BO software, you will get all the PDF. PDF is the good source. Or you can try the following book for Reference:
1. Creating Documents with BusinessObjects 5.1 by Robert D Schmidt
2. Business Objects in a Day by Nocentia

 

[cottontop]

Thanks!

Both of you. I think I'll start with the books nimmy99 mentioned. I read reviews of those and others and nimmy99's two had the best reviews!

Cottontop

 

[jimbopalmer]

one other point, IS tends to be very adverse to giving users access to the raw data, despite the fact that BO is a read only tool.

We defused some of those fears by granting select on the tables to BO, and creating the BO tablespace and user with synonyms to the actual tables. Thus the users were using a read only tool on a read only database structure, which greatly reduced the fears to the database administrators.

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[skrandel]

There is another one that will hit the market any day now. The Complete Business Objects Reference by Cindy Howson. It is a very thorough resource.

Steve Krandel
BASE Consulting Group

http://www.baseconsulting.com