Free BI eBook: Six Mistakes Companies Are Making Today And How You Can Avoid Them from SAP

I'm reading Business Intelligence Guide eBook [ 6 Mistakes Companies Are Making Today And How You Can Avoid Them ] which worth to share with all of you.

When the economy slows, many businesses react by retrenching and cutting costs in order to weather the downturn. Although such cost reduction is important, companies often overlook equally critical strategic decisions—opportunities to use valuable business information to strengthen product and service offerings and emerge ahead of the competition.

This paper highlights common mistakes companies make in a down economy and discusses how organizations can use business intelligence to avoid them. Use the self-assessment questionnaire at the end of this paper to determine the level of business intelligence opportunity across your organization.

While such cost reduction is important, companies often overlook equally critical strategic decisions—opportunities to use valuable business information to strengthen product and service offerings and emerge ahead of the competition. The paper highlights six common mistakes companies make in a down economy, and how organizations can use business intelligence to avoid them.

The ebook also includes a self-assessment questionnaire to determine the level of business intelligence opportunity across an organization.

It's limited time offer, PDF version:
Free Download: http://tinyurl.com/23edqlr

Happy New Year 2012 - All Music You Like

  

SharePoint in the NEWS - December 2011

IN THE COMMUNITY

With the introduction of SharePoint 2010, storage capabilities exploded. In fact, installations of 1TB are not uncommon anymore. What all this does, though, is create a massive headache for admins trying to control access and apply policies to all those documents and assets, because SharePoint's built-in security solution is very manual (labor-intensive) and is coarse-grained. "In SharePoint, people put non-sensitive content right next to sensitive content, so you have to manually assign permissions," said Antonio Maio, senior product manager at document security company Titus. In small installations, it is merely cumbersome. In those terabyte installations, this becomes virtually impossible. So a number of third-party solutions have come to market to address this SharePoint shortcoming, and many providers of this kind of software will be showcasing their expertise in the subject—and the products they have created—at February's SPTechCon in San Francisco. * * * From the BZ Media family (SPTechCon, SPTechReport, SD Times, AnDevCon, et. al.) to yours, we wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year. In the immortal words of Charles Dickens' Tiny Tim, "God bless us… everyone!" — David

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The best instructors in SharePoint at SPTechCon — February 26-29

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IN THE NEWS

Claims-based security from Titus

By David Rubinstein Document security company Titus has released a Claims Edition of its Metadata Security product, which allows organizations to use aspects of user identity to apply access control policies. User attributes that can be leveraged from claims include security clearance, location, time and type of connection. So, if a person's security clearance changes in his or her identity from "top secret" to "confidential," Metadata Security Claims Edition will automatically apply new access policies the next time that user logs in, and prevent him or her from seeing any top-secret documents automatically. The software also retrieves the IP address of the person signing in, so it can see what remote office or country the user is logging in from, and can use whatever policy is in place for remote users regarding what they can and cannot see. "Users can only see content they're permitted to see, based on the metadata, using any number of classifications or metadata fields," said Antonio Maio, Titus senior product manager. "With the Claims Edition, claims are retrieved at login from a trusted server, so it's dynamic, automated and consistent." Similarly, a person logging in from a secure VPN should have greater access to sensitive content than someone logging in from a public WiFi, he noted.

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If you use SharePoint, you most likely have more than one SharePoint farm and possibly several server farms, depending on your organization's business needs. Are you getting the most efficiency out of your SharePoint environment and your Wide Area Network (WAN)? Your business can be more agile and cost-effective by utilizing replication technology to create a distributed SharePoint environment. » Get the White Paper Today!

LINKAPALOOZA

The Linker is toast. A weekend of rum-laced eggnog, hot toddies and schnapps has left The Linker in a sorry state. It'll take all the strength he can muster to pop some champagne corks on New Year's Eve and remain conscious until the ball drops. He says he's up to the challenge, but it's a tall order indeed. Yet through it all, The Linker has never yielded his post, and again brings you good quality SharePoint information, along with a bit of video whimsy. See you in 2012! Trouble in the sandbox… SharePoint, ALM and continuous integration… SharePoint intranet implementation: critical success factors… Spotlight on PowerShell Scripts: Part I… SharePoint Social: Update your MySite and build a business social network. Not-so-random YouTube entry: Collaboration, North Pole style

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Enhancing SharePoint Security

There's a good chance that your SharePoint installation doesn't have the security granularity and flexibility needed to meet your company's security and compliance requirements. That's a big issue, but when you consider how SharePoint has evolved from a file-sharing and decentralized workgroup environment, it's easy to see why enterprise-class security isn't baked in. Fortunately, this 16-page technical paper can show you the three steps that you need to take in order to: • Control access to sensitive documents • Prevent unauthorized modification of documents • Raise awareness and educate users about sensitive document content Read this paper to learn how to address each of these areas. You'll see specific recommendations for enhancing SharePoint security: apply security automatically and consistently across the document repository. If you use SharePoint and care about security, read the paper today! » Read the paper today!

SHAREPOINTERS

The SharePoint Web Part Gallery

By Raymond Mitchell, SharePoint911 Anytime you choose to add a Web Part to your SharePoint pages, you're using the Web Part Gallery. It is the list of Web Parts (grouped by categories) that have been made available to you. The Web Part Gallery comes pre-populated with a number of default Web Parts. The exact Web Parts that appear depend on what version of SharePoint you have installed as well as what site template was selected when you created your site. READ MORE Raymond Mitchell is a consultant with SharePoint911.

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SharePoint911 has some of the best in the business available to help you take your project from an idea in your head to a mature portal solution to meet all of your needs. If you need a little more than general help, we can arrange for you to deal with one of our advanced specialists. Our advanced specialists can deal with your planning, business logic, visual design and custom development needs, billed in 15-minute increments with no further obligations. Whatever your needs, our consultants can help you plan, develop, implement and maintain your SharePoint solution. » CLICK HERE!

Top 10 BI predictions For 2012 by Boris Evelson

Boris Evelson
Forrester Research
for Information Management Blogs, November 15, 2011           
Here are my top 10 predictions for business intelligence in 2012:

1. It’s all about getting things done. Standards, a single version of the truth, and enterprise-grade platforms continue to be important, but individual BI tools with the functionality to get things done trumps standards.
2. Enterprises will learn to live with multiple BI tools. Forrester client inquiries about how to live with multiple BI tools far exceed inquiries about platform consolidations.
3. More BI will move into the hands of end users. IT will learn not fight it or risk becoming irrelevant. IT will also learn not to fight spreadmart/spreadsheet wars or risk becoming irrelevant. Why? See prediction #1.
4. Those BI platforms that support “managed” end user self-service will become more popular. It’s like the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. No management or control is not acceptable, but too much control does not work. Finding the right win-win combination that combines the flexibility and agility that self-service brings with behind-the-scenes monitoring and adjusting will become the name of the game.
5. Mobile BI will go mainstream. One needs to make decisions when and where they need to be made. Not “when I get back to the office,” which may be too late.
6. Cloud BI will continue to chip away at on-premises BI, but it’s still a long road ahead. Heavy customization and integration of enterprise BI platforms, tools, and applications done by subject-matter experts and consultants will not go away.
7. BI-specific DBMSes (in-memory, others) will go mainstream.
8. Big data will start to move out of silos and into enterprise IT. IT will start to learn how to live with it.
9. Exploration (without preconceived notions, prebuilt fixed data models, or up-front specific questions in mind) will be the new bread and butter of BI suites in addition to reporting, querying, OLAP, and dashboards/data visualization.
10. BI users will start demanding — and vendors will start delivering — BI tools integrated with email and collaboration platforms. Just integrating BI with Excel is no longer enough.

SharePoint in the NEWS

IN THE COMMUNITY

There are many aspects to SharePoint: collaboration, document storage and retrieval, workflow, business intelligence, search, security, governance, and so much more. Along with that, there is literally a ton of documentation and technical information for using the software. The problem for many SharePoint users is, where is it all, and where do I find it? You see folks on Twitter longing for a unified site where all the SharePoint information can be stored, sorted and retrieved, kind of a SharePoint for SharePoint information! Since that doesn’t exist, the question remains: Where do I go for solid technical information on SharePoint? If you’re like me, you want to get your information from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. That’s not to say other sources aren’t reliable or informative; it’s just that if I buy, say, a toaster, I’d rather read the company’s manual than notes from Ed the repairman. Nina Ruchirat is a Microsoft senior content project manager, and she has provided to SPTechReport a large amount of technical information, sorted by role, and other SharePoint resources (see Linkapalooza below). She indicated that all canonical documentation from Microsoft has been written, edited and technology reviewed through the SharePoint product team, and that the content group is placing a greater emphasis on social media and community content, with an eye toward best practices and case studies. Microsoft’s Ruchirat will be presenting a session at SPTechCon 2012 February in San Francisco on navigating through these sites to find the exact information you’re looking for. She also asks the community to give her feedback at @MSNinaR on Twitter for the types of content people most desire. “We’re focused on discoverability, and programming instant answers via search,” she said. “We want to get this content out and into people’s hands.” We hope you find this as helpful as we have. — David

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IN THE NEWS

Mindjet announces visual collaboration software for SharePoint

By David Rubinstein Mindjet yesterday released Connect SP for SharePoint, software that the company said provides visual collaboration and enhanced document discovery features for enterprises looking to increase adoption within their organizations. The software, according to the company, provides a more intuitive visual display that makes it easier for workers to share ideas on projects while locating information faster and collaborating directly inside the SharePoint environment. “Connect SP displays information in a visual manner, so team members can better understand and align on critical issues and plans,” said Blaine Mathieu, chief product officer at Mindjet, in a statement announcing the software. Connect SP, an extension of the company’s Connect collaboration software, works off the existing SharePoint implementation’s infrastructure for managing governance, security and compliance issues. It uses the Connect mapping client for capturing and organizing ideas and information in a single view.

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The best instructors in SharePoint at SPTechCon — February 26-29

SPTechCon is coming back to San Francisco, Feb. 26-29! Choose from more than 90 classes and workshops. The course catalog is now available online; download it today and start planning your SPTechCon experience. Learn from many of the top SharePoint professionals in the industry: Ted Pattison, Bill English, Ben Curry, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, Andrew Connell, Eric Shupps, Laura Rogers and many more! SPTechCon San Francisco February 26-29, 2012 » Register by Friday Dec. 16th—SAVE $450!

LINKAPALOOZA

Today, The Linker turns his forum over to Nina Ruchirat, Microsoft senior content project manager, who lists the related links and resources she’ll be discussing at SPTechCon 2012 in San Francisco. There are a lot of them, as you can see, which is why The Linker pitched this as a session to the SPTechCon powers that be. You can follow Nina at @MSNinaR on Twitter. IT Pro TechNet SharePoint TechCenter... TechNet Library Technical Documentation... SharePoint Server 2010 TechCenter... SharePoint Foundation 2010 TechCenter... SharePoint Online Administration TechCenter... To the SharePoint (IT Pro Content Team) blog... MSOffice_IT Pro on Twitter (Office and SharePoint)... Developer MSDN SharePoint Developer Center... MSDN Library Technical Documentation... SharePoint 2010 Software Development Kit... What's new for Developers in SharePoint 2010... SharePoint 2010 Developer Resource Centers... SharePointDev (Developer Content Team) blog... MSDN_Office on Twitter (Office and SharePoint)... LOB information workers SharePoint Server 2010 help content... Get the Point (IW Content Team)... SharePoint Online SharePoint Online Administration TechCenter... SharePoint Online planning guide for Office 365 for enterprises... Forums SharePoint technical forums... SharePoint Online technical forums...

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DevCon5 HTML5 Developer and Designer Conference

DevCon5, Dec. 7-8 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer attendees a comprehensive HTML5 program, from HTML5 design and execution, to building new HTML5 business models based on HTML5 Mobile, Cloud and ecommerce capabilities. DevCon5 topics include UI Design, cross-browser development, CSS3, JavaScript, Scalar Vector Graphics, WebGL, user experience design, security, and more. Meet with fellow developers, designers, Web architects and business leaders. register today and use priority code SD to save 15%. »Register NOW!

SHAREPOINTERS

Using HTML5 and CSS3 with SharePoint 2010

By Randy Drisgill, SharePoint911 In one of my previous articles, I talked about how everyone at conferences asks about mobile, but I’d say the second most frequently asked question is about HTML5 and SharePoint. HTML5 is certainly the future of the Web, but as a person that leans toward the design side of things, I really think CSS3 is way more exciting. READ MORE Randy Drisgill is a consultant at SharePoint911 and a Microsoft MVP in the technology.

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SharePoint911

SharePoint911 has some of the best in the business available to help you take your project from an idea in your head to a mature portal solution to meet all of your needs. If you need a little more than general help, we can arrange for you to deal with one of our advanced specialists. Our advanced specialists can deal with your planning, business logic, visual design and custom development needs, billed in 15-minute increments with no further obligations. Whatever your needs, our consultants can help you plan, develop, implement and maintain your SharePoint solution. » CLICK HERE!

BI This Week

News Highlights Read Share QlikView Update Gets an Enterprise-Oriented Makeover Stephen Swoyer The revamped QlikView 11 boasts new social and collaborative amenities and a mostly platform-agnostic mobility story. Its enterprise feature-set might merit the most attention, however. Although QlikView never pitched itself as an enterprise BI platform it's doing just that with the latest version. Read Share   Oracle Announces Exalytics for In-Memory, Visual BI Cindi Howson At Oracle Open World, the company announced a new combination hardware/software solution, laying down the gauntlet to SAP and specialty visualization vendors. Read Share GIS Enriches Data, Enhances Decision Making Stephen Swoyer GIS information can enrich internal data, improve business processes, or enhance decision making. If you're a large organization, you probably already have a GIS practice somewhere in your enterprise, whether you know it or not. So why aren't you using it? Read Share Integrating Canonical Message Models and Enterprise Data Models (Part 1 of 3) Dr. Tom Johnston The enterprise data model (EDM) has failed. We explore a new way of using EDMs -- one in which an EDM can more directly affect the management of data than as merely a paper reference model. Read Share Q&A: Governance Challenges of Unstructured Data Linda Briggs Unstructured and semi-structured data presents special data governance challenges, and its mushrooming growth over the past several years makes its management a special problem. In the second part of our two-part interview, Daniel Teachey addresses this and other issues surrounding data governance. Read Putting the "BI" in Big Data Andrew J. Brust Microsoft's recent announcements aren't about just Big Data; they're about Big BI, now open for Big Business.

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TDWI Webinar Series: Dashboards & Visual Discovery Tools: An Evaluation Framework Speaker: Cindi Howson November 9 9:00AM PT Register Now Dashboards and visual discovery are now must-have components of the BI tool portfolio.

Upcoming Webinars of Interest Effective Presentation of Analytical Results Today the world is flooded with information. How do you make sense of it all, and how can you then best share your findings with others? Speaker: Jonathan Koomey November 10 9:00AM PT Register Now ETL 2.0: The Imminent Evolution of ETL Most ETL environments were designed for the business requirements of at least ten years ago -- before the number of data sources, applications and use-cases exploded, and before the demands of Big Data, social media and mobile technology were added to the mix. Speaker: Robin Bloor November 16 9:00AM PT Register Now

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SharePoint News Report

IN THE COMMUNITY

Unit testing is a tenet of Extreme Programming, one of the underpinnings of agile software development practices. Yet, according to several experts, a surprising number of developers still are not doing it. For developers writing SharePoint applications, there are fundamental impediments to unit testing. First, according to Critical Path Training consultant Andrew Connell, it requires developers to have a live SharePoint instance on their machines, because custom code “will inevitably use something from the SharePoint API that doesn’t work in an offline mode, per se.” This is a problem in developing for any platform that requires a full instance to test against, such as Windows Azure, Microsoft CRM, Salesforce and other enterprise platforms. The way to address this problem is through mocking, or faking, the necessary piece to complete the test, Connell explained. The mocking framework essentially hijacks the real call and rewires it to do something else, so a running instance of SharePoint is not required. There are commercial solutions available, such as Typemock’s Isolator, as well as Moles, a Microsoft Research project. Typemock’s solution mocks up SharePoint objects such as SPSites for site collections, SPWebs for sites, SPLists for lists, or SPListItems for items, among others. Eli Lopian, founder and CEO of Typemock, hopes the tool will encourage developers to do unit testing. “Developers write code and send it off to QA, which runs some regression tests, and the code ping-pongs between IT and QA,” Lopian said. “Unit testing is hard to practice, and that is coupled with pressure to get software out the door quickly.” As more organizations move to agile development practices, though, he believes unit testing will become more routine. —David

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IN THE NEWS

H3 updates Mobile Entrée platform for SharePoint

By David Rubinstein With an HTML5 framework for mobile applications to run offline, and support for PerformancePoint scorecards and reports, H3 Solutions yesterday unveiled Mobile Entrée 3.0, the most recent version of its mobile application development platform. Mobile Entrée 3.0 includes business intelligence capabilities that can leverage Microsoft’s PerformancePoint software for scaling Excel Services or PowerPivot dashboards, and adds a touch-friendly experience for smartphones, according to the company announcement. A new HTML5 framework lets developers create applications that have the ability to run offline in Android and iOS devices. "We have made it easy for .NET developers to create installable HTML5 Web applications," Mike Herres, president of H3 Solutions, said in the announcement. "Offline capability was the biggest ask from our customers, and we have delivered with a highly flexible solution that will run on the two most popular mobile platforms." Here are the company’s 3.0 release notes.

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9 Things You Should Be Doing with Your SharePoint Environment Today

Whether you have SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010, you can benefit from attending this session where we will show you how to use ControlPoint to: Manage SharePoint Permissions; Analyze SharePoint usage and activity; Audit your SharePoint environment; Identify SharePoint governance violations; Analyze SharePoint content and storage; Clean Up, Manage and Configure SharePoint accounts and sites; and more! Webinar: November 3, 2011 – 2:00pm EDT » Register Now!

LINKAPALOOZA

Today, The Linker is agitated. He saw in his snail-mail a letter from the county’s Red Light Safety Program, which when opened revealed a cheesy photo (doctored, he suspects) of The Link-Mobile apparently running a red light. Well, The Linker is just not that kind of driver, so he went to the website listed on the violation to view the video of the incident. It was not a “blown” red light; The Linker merely made a legal right turn on red. The Linker has filed a challenge to get a hearing on the case, so he may be called away at the precise time you all need a link fix! So here are a number of links that’ll help you keep on truckin’ smoothly along that SharePoint highway. Best practices for migrating SharePoint to the cloud... SharePoint 2010 site templates... The coming upgrades for SharePoint Online... Custom development strategy more crucial than ever... SharePoint and Office Web apps... Install language packs for SharePoint 2010... Not-so-random YouTube entry: Right on Red

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The hottest names in SharePoint at SPTechCon—February 26-29

SPTechCon is coming back to San Francisco. Join us Feb. 26-29, right near San Francisco’s historic Union Square, for the biggest and best SharePoint event. Learn from many of the top SharePoint professionals in the industry; Ted Pattison, Bill English, Ben Curry, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, Andrew Connell, Eric Shupps, Laura Rogers and many more! SPTechCon San Francisco February 26-29, 2012 » Register by Friday Nov. 4—SAVE $500!

SHAREPOINTERS

The mid-project assessment

By Eric Riz, Concatenate SharePoint assessments are a way to set objectives, make creative business-level suggestions, and baseline the project. The goal is to analyze your corporate needs and assess your ability to deploy SharePoint effectively, while improving your business operations and hopefully leveraging your existing legacy systems—and by systems, I mean data—before beginning the implementation. Companies then follow the outline through project completion, at which time the project team will walk through a “Lessons Learned” session, noting what was implemented and the differences between the assessment and the end result. All this is well and good in principle if you want to measure your success once the project is over, but how many of you do mid-project assessments on your SharePoint implementations? READ MORE Eric is the EVP of Systems Integration for Concatenate, a software firm focused on maximizing SharePoint through product innovation and systems integration based in Toronto. You can reach Eric by email at ericr@concatenateinc.com and read his other SharePoint thoughts on his blog at www.ericriz.com.

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