Join me at the InfoSol BI Seminar2011

Posted on April 27, 2011 by

One of my favorite events of the year is the Infosol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS). Held at the beautiful Ritz Carlton in Dana Point California, this is the perfect time of year to make your way to the left coast to join us for a very informative 3 days of learning. For those of you who don’t want to leave the sunshine and ocean views, Evan Delodder our Flexcelsius guru will be delivering Flexcelsius Bootcamp as one of the post IBIS training courses.

What makes this seminar really good, is the hands-on, labs approach to many of the tracks. Rather than sitting in a drab room while watching endless powerpoint slides, you get hands on experience and all of the samples you need to take home with you. This seminar is all inclusive meaning you pay one price to get hotel, group meals, and even cocktails during the vendor exhibitions.

That is where I hope to see some of you so we can share war stories over drinks.

To summarize…
1. Three days of Xcelsius, Crystal Reports, and/or WebIntelligence to fill your pallet tips, tricks, and hands on experience
2. Two days of Flexcelsius Bootcamp
3. All inclusive hotel stay at the Ritz Carlton
4. Socialize with experts and fellow customers who eat, breathe and sleep SAP BusinessObjects

Check out the InfoSol website for all of the IBIS details and feel free to reach out if you have any questions. LEARN MORE

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Weekend of Writing

Posted on April 18, 2011 by

This weekend was quite productive as I carved out time to catch up on long over-due articles. Starting with GMaps Plugin we have three new tutorials and a handful of new templates that I created:

Editing Shapefiles
Filtering and Drilling geo-data
Using GMaps Plugin Series

Wrapping up the webinar from a few weeks ago “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Jumpstart” I have also posted on SCN, a list of the many questions asked during the webinar along with a PDF presentation that I delivered. View SCN blog

Finally, I am excited to have wrapped up a new article for next month’s Dashboard Insight focusing on location aware mobile mapping solutions for business users. My team and I have been doing some very interesting work in this area, on what will be GMaps Mobile. I hope to share more in the upcoming weeks leading up to SAP Sapphire.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Other | 14 Comments

Multi-media Story Telling at its Best

Posted on April 17, 2011 by

Learning about technology on vendor websites is drab and boring… While marketers seem to re-use the same dictionary of terms to describe their products, the art of storytelling has been lost.

Our friends from Bank Trends have produced a video that highlights a recent trend of no-nonsense narratives that communicates what Bank Trends does very well. It also happens to include GMaps Plugin.

One of my favorite firms who produce these kind of video stories is Epipeo Studios. They have truly mastered this art and have built a very successful business to monetize story telling for technology companies.

Looking at our own marking video that explains GMaps Plugin, I know what our next marketing project will be!

What videos do you find very informative for describing products?

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Widgets | 14 Comments

Android in your Auto

Posted on April 11, 2011 by

As an automotive enthusiast, I was excited to see Saab integrate Google Android into their new iQon “icon” in-dash command center. While the user experience looks beautiful, I know from experience that a touch screen experience can be quite distracting while on the road.

I believe for any automotive application for Android, voice recognition is absolutely critical. In California it is illegal to use your mobile phone while driving so I can’t imagine reading your Facebook on the dash will improve anyone’s driving.

We will see over the next few years if other auto manufacturers pick up Android. Perhaps I can one day I can retrofit my 67 Continental with cool new technology.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Mobile visualization | 1 Comment

Dashboard Sizing Best Practices

Posted on April 8, 2011 by

A long time ago, I created a top 10 design best practices and one of them was designing to 100% scale. This means when you build an SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard ( Xcelsius ) SWF the browser shouldn’t have to re-scale it. In doing so you ensure that the output always looks the same. If you are curious how to modify your dimensions go to File>Document Properties

I recently received a question about optimal canvas sizing, and in my presentation I stated that 900×600 is a good starting size. What I didn’t do was fully explain why… Here is the reason:

The reason I start at 900×600 is 600 pixel hieght will fit in most browsers at 1024×768 even with the many toolbars that people use (yahoo, msft, virus scanner, et). The good news is most browsers are getting toned down in header size, which means you can make SWFs taller. A lot of my dashboards now are at 650 pixels in hight, which will also work if there is no other content on the page. For the dashboard width you can go all the way to 1000 pixels, but I find that if I start with 900 I can always get bigger. If I start all the way around 1000 I find that I always need an extra 50 or so pixels.

What you do not want to do, is rely on your computer resolution to drive the dashboard size. I have seen many 1200×1080 dashboards which does impact the SWF size slightly and forces Flash player to do more work scaling the dashboard down into a much smaller resolution. The performance impact is not game changing but some of the undesirable. For example, I know text sizing and cutt off is probably the most visible result of scaling gone wrong.

Let me know what you do for sizing or issues you experience with scaling.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Xcelsius | 2 Comments

Salesforce.com Integration for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and Xcelsius

Posted on April 1, 2011 by

Last year, I was fortunate to join the DashConn beta program . Now generally available, IdeaCrop’s DashConn solution provides an extremely powerful salesforce.com integration for Xcelsius and SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
DashConn is a true plug and play solution allowing you to quickly integrate data directly from salesforce.com. Leveraging Salesforce CRM reports to do the heavy lifting and data mapping, DashConn provides the easiest possible process for building salesforce.com dashboards within Xcelsius, using skills you already have. If you can create a Salesforce CRM report, DashConn will automatically consume the metadata and expose it through a data connection or DataGrid component.

REAL WORLD USE
The first production ready dashboard I built with DashConn was for software support. Because we use Salesfoce.com for customer portal and software support, I had found the standard Salesforce CRM web page cumbersome. A few basic Xcelsius components with DashConn connectivity now provides my entire support chain with an at-glance view of all cases. The resulting dashboard took me 4 hours from start to finish and is illustrated below:

SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE
I am often asked why I don’t use out-of-the box Salesforce CRM dashboards. In many cases these dashboards show only one slice of the entire story that I’m trying to study. For example, when we capture trial download leads and closed/won opportunities, there is no way within Salesforce CRM to visualize the various conversion rates. With DashConn and Xcelsius I can create a dashboard that allows us to view and quickly analyze these conversion rates in aggregate or one-by-one.

If you use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards or Xcelsius and Salesforce CRM and are looking to provide your organization with deeper analysis and insights of your sales data, DashConn is exactly what you have been looking for.

WHERE TO GET MORE INFORMATION
More information about DashConn is available on the IdeaCrop website. If you have any questions about my experience feel free to post them here.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Connectivity, Xcelsius, Xcelsius Add-Ons | Leave a Comment

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