OS X “The system could not be restarted… Delete restoration data”
Posted on December 2, 2009
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On a side note, I recently bought a MacBook Pro running OS X Snow Leopard and I’m running Windows XP with VMWare Fusion 3.0. This morning I tried running my Windows Boot Camp partition and got this error:
The system could not be restarted from its previous location due to a read failure. Delete restoration data and proceed to system boot menu.
This obviously freaked me out b/c I thought my Windows Boot Camp partition was gone. Googling it didn’t help at all. I shut down and tried rebooting straight into Windows rather than OS X. I found out that Windows had gone into Hibernation mode that last time I used it. So all I had to do was shut down Windows properly and then boot back into OS X. All is fine now. Hopefully this will help out someone else in the future from freaking out like me. 
Crystal Reports 2008 Sample Reports for download
Posted on November 5, 2009
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Crystal Reports 2008 sample reports are not put on your computer during the installation process. In prior versions of Crystal Reports, all samples were installed by default. To make it easier for everyone to download the sample files, I placed them on my server so that you can download them here.
One more thing – the previous sample reports used the Xtreme.mdb database as their data source. The 2008 sample data is now an XML file. So be sure to download that as well. If you somehow landed on this page b/c you are looking for the Xtreme.mdb database, I have that available as well. You can find that file in this blog post: Crystal Reports Xtreme.mdb download
Click on the following links for everything you need:
The url for all Crystal Reports file downloads (including the ones above) is at Crystal Reports Files
I hope this helps!
Brian
Using Wildcards with Record Selection Formula
Posted on October 19, 2009
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This video shows you how the ? and * wildcards work with the LIKE operator in a record selection formula. It shows how the report output changes depending up the wildcard used.
Crystal Reports Xtreme.mdb download
Posted on September 17, 2008
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In the premium section of the website today (http://members.crystalreportsbook.com/
), one of the members asked where they could download the Xtreme.mdb database. I figured that this was an easy question because Business Objects has a download link on their website. Unfortunately, after the acquisition by SAP, all their download files have been consolidated into a single location, and half the files are missing. It’s really a mess! I hope they continue to improve this area of the website because it is really important for use to be able to download files from the support site. Anyway, I uploaded my copy of Xtreme.mdb to this blog so that you can download it if you need it. Here is the link:
The link for all the Crsytal Reports related downloads (where Xtreme.mdb should be) is here:
You can learn more about getting access to exclusive Crystal Reports online content by clicking here.
TechEd 2008: John Schwarz keynote speech
Posted on September 17, 2008
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Tuesday morning, the first full day of TechEd, John Schwarz started the day with his kenote speech. This is a summary of the morning’s proceedings.
Zia Yusuf opened the keynote by announcing the partnership with Innocentive. It is an open innovation marketplace where experts can solve challenges in technology, science and business. Challenges are posted publicly, with a monetary reward, and if you solve the challenge you will get paid the stated amount of money.
Innocentive was founded in 2001 by Eli Lilly for “prize based innovation”. They have posted hundreds of challenges and given away thousands of dollars in rewards. The integration with SAP extends this concept across the enterprise. The current largest prize is $1 million for the biomarker for Lou Gerigs disease. The SAP Innocentive page is at: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/innocentive
The collaborative book by the SAP Community, “Process First”, was just released today. It studies the evolution of the business process expert. It was a wiki that was developed by the community and is now a published book available via a free download or purchased at Amazon. The free pdf is located here:
Keynote: John Shwarz, CEO BOBJ
50% of the world’s GNP passes through an SAP system somewhere along the process. If we don’t do our job well, this can have a huge impact on the world. If we do our job well, we can enable great things to happen.
We operate in a world that is getting very flat and very connected. How do we operate in this new world? The boundaries are disappearing. We are shifting from being company centric, to customer centric. Customers are linking to other customers and they want to share the chain of information. We no longer own the processes that drive our business. Now we work with other organizations that share these processes. We also have to share the risk and anticipate the consequences that come with that risk.
SAP helps you connect your strategy to your execution and then connect the execution to your strategy.
SAP has three fundamentals:
1. Drive processes efficiently.
2. Improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution.
3. Flexibiliy to create new business processes and adapt the existing processes.
BOBJ gives you access to your data without the need of tech support. It gives you insight to your information. BOBJ also gives you GRC compliance with any rules you set in place.
SAP is developing a new suite of applications that allow you to manage the performance of your business. It helps you understand how well the resources you have deployed are being used. These applications connect BOBJ with SAP software and are the first of their kind with the combined BOBJ and SAP company.
SAP is not a product company, but a business company providing business solutions. Giving the ability to manage your business and visualize performance.
New enhancement packages let you pick and choose which packages you want to apply to your implementation. You no longer have deploy/implement the entire infrastructure. The Switch Framework gives you selective activation and fast upgrades.
SAP Business Suite gives you ubiquitous access and is completely SOA enabled.
BOBJ gives access to unified information. It allows collaborative information and business network optimization. There are four product lines that enable all of this:
- Enterprise performance Mgmt,
- GRC
- Business Intelligence
- Information management.
Today’s BOBJ is complete performance optimization corporation. We give you access to your information without needing IT support to intervene.
Demo 1 (by Don MacCormack):
How to use data in SAP systems and distribute throughout your organization using BOBJ tools. He showed data in a BEx report using a backend in Germany. He loaded up Crystal Reports, loaded a BW query and put it into a new report. He did some summaries on revenues across groups. He then added a chart and applied an existing template to it so that it met the corporate standard. He showed how this lets BOBJ tools let you target the information for the specific customer.
He opened Excel and pulled live data from the Crystal Report. The spreadsheet was then loaded into Xcelsius and he built a dashboard that combined a chart, gauge and slider and linked them all together so that you can change this discount percent to see how it effects revenues. All this was done in about five minutes! The whole crowd gave him a round of applause. One very cool aspect of the demo was that the original demo showed a flat representation of the world. He changed it to a 3-D globe that rotated within the dashboard. As you rotate the globe, you can click on various countries and the charts are updated automatically with that information specific to that country. There was another round of applause.
The next demo was of Polestar. It gives you the search capabilities within your corporate data and makes it easy to visualize that data in relationship to key data points and drill down into that data with slick animations. He was able to query over one billion records located in Waldorf and get real-time results in a few seconds. More applause.
(John back on stage…)
Business Intelligence Accelerator is the key the high-speed query results. Integrating this into a NetWeaver implementation is a key point of optimizting the performance of BOBJ software.
The Beta Program is available to SAP customers and people can sign up via SDN. This allows customers to be involved in early releases and define what is in the final product.
Where is the SAP/BOBJ company going? Users want to access the system via any format, any device and any place that you want to be. The user is the expert in the interface they want to use. So why should SAP recreate the wheel? The key to enabling this is the Client Adaptation Layer which makes data accessible to specific clients. The second key is the Semantic Layer which allows data to come from any source, and in any format. The combination of these two layers make data accessible in every format for every user. This creates a horizontally connected world through the two layers.
John’s Call to Action:
- Upgrade to ERP 6.0. It is the basis for all future products.
- Leverage joing power of SAP and BOBJ. Upgrade to BOXI 3.0.
- Sign up for the beta program to become part of the process mgmt reingineering.
There was a short Q&A session via videos emailed to SAP TechEd:
What is the adoption rate of BOBJ within the existing SAP customers?
There were 5,000 joint customers before the BOBJ acquisitoin. After the acquisition, 2/3 of business is with BOBJ customers. Some customers have more than 100,000 seats of the BOBJ tools.
What happens to the different innovations that are created at SAP? Is there a way to track this?
The company needs to do a better job of tracking this. Customers should continue to submit innovations to SAP.
TechEd: Excelsius Q&A in the Clubhouse
Posted on September 11, 2008
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In the Clubhouse, Saskia Battersby, Xcelsius Senior Product Manager, and Ingo Hilgefort sat down with SAP Mentors for a Q&A session on the Xcelsius product. This is a summary of the conversation.
What is status of Flash Islands?
SP 1 is coming out next month and it has support for Flash Islands. We need to improve the embeddeding process.
How did Donald get the spinning globe working in yesterday’s demo?
Xcelsius supports Flex now and lets them expose an SDK so people can create extensions for Xcelsius. There is a marketplace where components can be shared. It uses Flex 2 (although Flex 3 is now out).
If you can build components in Flex, why use Xcelsius?
Xcelsius makes databinding and connecting to data sources easy. If you know how to use Excel, you can use Flex objects and include Excel macros. Vince Kohli commented that he knows very little about HTML, but downloaded the Flex Builder and found it very easy to build components.
Ingo’s comment: Polestar has been a year on the market, and customers are using it as a starting point to look for an answer. Then from there you can move to WebI or Voyager to analyze the data further. OpenDocument lets you move between all the BOBJ tools easily.
What is the future for data connectivity in Xcelsius?
Xcelsiuis was started by a company that wasn’t focused on data. After the acquisitions by SAP, they are now refocusing the team on including better connectivity. These improvements should be seen in the next release in 2010.
Why can’t Xcelsius can’t consume all SAP webservices.
Ingo: Xcelsius expects a row-column structure, but SAP has much more complex data and Xcelsius can’t consume it (unless using Query as WS). Xcelsius 2008 lets you build your own connectors to customize it to your data source. A lot of people are moving toward Live Office b/c they don’t want to go against BW.
TechEd Q&A with John Schwarz and Zia Yusuf
Posted on September 11, 2008
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During TechEd, there was an executive Q&A with John Schwarz and Zia Yusuf. In attendence were members of the press and SAP Mentors. This is a summary of the Q&A session.
What issues have you come across regarding Intellectual Property?
So far there haven’t been any related to SDN content. The transfer of IP from the solver to the seeker is very important. If this doesn’t work, the whole process breaks down. Innocentive has the expertise to do this within many countries and they have had a 99% success rate. They have done software IP transfer for over a year. “It takes a minute to learn, and a lifetime to master”.
BOBJ has changed the role of the CFO to becoming more predictive. The job is now “Chief Performance Officer”. How will this affect other roles at the executive level?
The forecasting and analysis tools make the CFO a participant in the management of a company. The current stragety is to atuomate the CFO’s job so he is not a ’spreadsheet jockey’ and instead becomes an expert at modeling future performance. The next level is to move this to sales mgmt and place these tools on top of CRM. This will also happen with manufacturing. The core is progression from analytics to planning, forecasting, and trend analysis.
Have you given thought to enhancing collaboration on project implementation use?
Yes, but its a grey zone (in a good way). SDN lets you search for top contributors by company and that many of them are System Integrators. 83% of participants are partners and customers. Companies are leveraging the site to get this knowledge from the expert SIs. This collaboration creates an entry point between providers of services to potential customers. There are environments in SAP that are specifically designed to enable collaboration. You can invite people to solve a specific problem and work together to solve that problem.
With the increased emphasis on business process skillsets, there are skeptical views: The best consultants always have these skills. Thus, they don’t need certifications.
The demand for certifications is coming from the customers b/c they want a way to evaluate experts who aren’t well known in the industry. As you move between companies, the certification gives you immediate credibility within a new organization. Re the people who aren’t enthusiastic about certification, that doesn’t bother SAP. People who don’t like it can continue on their path, but those who embrace it will be rewarded.
When will certifications be released beyond the basic modules (e.g. FI) and move into more specific vertical markets?
This will take a while to learn and ramp up on. In the meantime, SAP has consulting partners who are the experts in the vertical markets. Their association with SAP shows that they are experts in an area without getting the certification.
What are the challenges to certification when best practices are always evolving?
I’m very confident of the technical ability to provide certifications. As best practices evolve and put into place, certain ones will become de-facto standards and once this happens that certifications and be applied.
Why isn’t BOBJ doing more with predictive analytics?
There is a tight partnership with SPSS. The predictive engine from SPSS is shiped within BOBJ. SAP doesn’t build it themselves b/c of the extensive expertise necessary to do this right, and there aren’t any companies in this area that would be good to acquire.
What is BOBJ planning to do to mitigate a credibilty problem that can result from dealing with uncertainty?
There aren’t any best practices related to this yet. By recognizing the difference between historical data and predictive data, you can mitigate risk. With GRC, you can deploy business rules that define what is allowable within a business process and alert the user that the results are not reasonable given past performance. This works best in pharmaceuticals with a chemical process. It’s too bad that the finance industry hasn’t done this with loan instruments and we wouldn’t have the consequences that we are seeing in today’s economy.
What are your goals for integrating the BOBJ tools into SAP?
The goal is to integrate the SAP and BOBJ tools into seamless products. This will be in production in 2009. SAP is learning how to attach BOBJ predictive analytics to specific vertical markets and create best practices. But these will sit outside of the SAP suite and provide additional capabilities.
What are the new innovations SAP is working on?
Last year we completed the SOA roadmap. Now we are in the stage of consumption where customers are coming online and putting the prodects into production. They want to lower TCO of existing products and make them easier to consume through embedded capabilities. It’s also about building the communities of experts that are making the connections with SOA components in unique ways that solve their problems. It requires customers to get involved with SDN to communicate what is learned as the products are put into production. This is why we created Collaboration Workspace. The enterprise service community was responsible for 52% of the enhancements that were released in the past year. Collaboration Workshop makes it easy for small communites to work together online.
TechEd Keynote – Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder
Posted on September 11, 2008
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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, kicked off SAP TechEd 2008 as the keynote speaker. He wil cover four areas: Wikipedia, Wikia, Wikia Search, and Lessons for Business.
Overall, people misunderstand what Web 2.0 is. Web 2.0 is more than just AJAX enabled sites and blogs. It is moving control from the center to the outlying area.
History of Wikipedia
Founded in 2001 on a single server. Wikipedia was the outgrowth of Newpedia which wasn’t working due to its top-down structure. Wikipedia was founded as a hobby project and grew. The core vision is for us to imagine a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
Wikipedia is not a data dump with everything imagineable. It is an encyclopedia with knowledge in specific areas. Wikipedia is free: you can copy, modify, and redistribute it. This can be for either commercial or non-commercial purposes.
Wikipedia Today:
- 263M unique users. This is 31% of all internet users.
- 15 employees
- Spent $2M last year, possibly $4M this year
- Spend $0 on advertising
- Core Value: community control
Wikia
Founded in 2004. There are 15,271 articles online.
Wikia’s goal: To become the world’s largest sustainable, free-content, user controlled media company.
Wikia Search
Goal: Create an open source search engine.
Search statistics:
- 91% of Americans use search eninges.
- 90% of queries are in the hands of Google (61.5%), Yahoo(20.9%) and Microsoft(9.2%)
Wikia Search URL: http://search.wikia.com
The search engines want you to think that search is an algorithm. In reality, it is an editorial statement. When they suggest to you which pages to read for a particular search query, they are really giving you editorial content. There is no way to determine how search results are derived and how much weight is given to certain sites.
Google recommends that if you want to rank better that you need to hire an SEO (Search Engine Optimizer). This implies that they are recommending that you ”game the system”.
A problem with search is that it is read only. Search engines need to have their searches editable so that they can be improved. To fix this, make the search code open source so that anyone can contribute to it and improve it.
Grub is a distributable web crawler so that other people can help crawl the web and build their database. It was public, then went private, then Wikia bought it to make it public again. Now anyone can run it and the data is used to build the Wikia database.
Wikia Guiding Principles:
- Transparency: The most respected institutions treat transparency as a requirement.
- Community: Everyone must be able to contribute to and benefit from the project.
- Quality: The human touch is a necessary ingredient in providing accurate results.
- Privacy: The details of our searches – our private lives – must not be subject to the scrutiny of others.
Lessons for Business
Philosophy of Benevolence in Design: Rather than look at every possible bad outcome, and designing within this realm of paranoria, assume only the best will happen. But don’t be stupid about it. Have measures in place for when something goes wrong so that it can be handled quickly.
The number of malicious people is very small. Keeping people accountable keeps the system in check. You can think like a municipal government where you have safeguards in place while still giving people their freedom.
How do we encourage collaboration in the enterprise?
Some of the issues are technological, but the biggest isses are social. The question is how to make the available tools more accessible. But it really becomes a social dilemma where you need more women to feel that this is a welcoming environment that encourages participation (80% of participants are men). Men have a propensity to be the authority on a subject that they might not be experts in. Women are more intested in having a conversation about a subject to discuss and learn as a group. There needs to be tools to make this form of involvement easier to participate in. There also needs to be outreach within the company to encourage participation.
TechEd Community Day – Q&A with Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder
Posted on September 11, 2008
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At SAP TechEd 2008, Mark Finnern introduced Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and opened the floor to any questions for Jimmy. This is a summary of the questions and answers.
Will Wikipedia become more multi-media friendly?
Yes. There is a lot of collaboration in text right now, but not other medias. This is b/c text is so fluid. But media like video is harder to edit in a group context. Wikipedia is a social innovation, not technical. The technical aspects of multi-media are commonplace, but the tools aren’t there for collaboration. Hopefully, in the next five years someone will invent a new method for collaborating with different media so that it can become commonplace.
Many corporate sites don’t use MediaWiki (what powers Wikipedia). Are they missing out on key features?
MediaWiki has traditionally been very weak with the enterprise (e.g. single sign-on). Since it is open source, there is no business model around it to market to the enterprise and, consequently, no new features get added. Mark Finnern added that the concern with SDN Wiki is that they needed a granular approach to security and MediaWiki doesn’t have this available.
How did you plan to ensure quality in an open forum?
The idea that someone could create an open site like Wikipedia with quality information sounds ludicrous. Prior to Wikipedia, he found a site called NewPedia and there was a top-down structure for enforcing control. It was a failure due to the workload and that it was no fun to work on. Jimmy originally felt that once Wikipedia became popular that they would have to lock it down at some point. But he found out that the gate keeping model isn’t necessary. Instead, the accountability model works b/c users can watch certain users and monitor their actions. With accountability, people learn who are the experts and who has a solid reputation and can be trusted.
Have you considered a point system to build reputation?
We don’t like this because then people try to game the system. There is a way to track how many times people make edits, and this can help to gauge activity. But this isn’t a hard and fast way to track a user’s overall contribution to the site. For example, a person could spend hours writing a single quality post, and this is much more effective than someone who made ten small corrections on different pages.
A substantial number of articles were written by only a few people. If you were to evaluate the individual vs the group effect, how do you do so?
This is very hard to measure. The group dynamics vary dramatically within each category and its hard to make a judgement.
How will Wikipedia change education?
In the past, the spectrum of information sources was very limited to newspapers and the family’s copy of the encyclopedia. Today, it’s not as important to teach students how to get information. Instead, you want to teach students how to judge the quality of that information. There are so many resources available today, you have to know how to filter out the unreliable sources from the reliable ones.
How can we bring the Wikipedia concept into the enterprise so that people will take the time to contribute as well as share what they know.
This is actually a very involved disucussion, but the 15 second answer is that the corporation needs to promote internal collaboration by honoring and rewarding the people who do contribute. This will encourage others to become more active.
SAP TechEd – WebI Best Practices
Posted on September 10, 2008
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At SAP TechEd 2008, Ingo Hilgefort gave us his best practices for using WebI. This is a summary of that presentation.
Ingo Hilgefort started out getting a hand count of how many people have used WebI reports on SAP. Only a couple hands went up. He figured that this would be the case and said that he would aways give an overview of each topic before going into the details to make sure that everyone understand the content. He also encouraged everyone to ask questions during the presentation. I’ll put these questions within this blog entry.
WebI is an adhoc reporting tool where you give the user a set of metadata to report from. The user doesn’t get a static report anymore. They can make it dynamic.
Q: How is the BOBJ MDM different from SAP’s MDM?
A: This IS the SAP MBM. But the bundling is different
BOBJ MDM stands for “Metadata Management” and NOT “Master Data Mgmt” There is a big difference.
Two ways to access the data:
Use the exising BI queries to leverage all the metadata.
Q: Can you connect BEx Query to MutliProvider?
A: Yes
He gave us a chart showing the BAPI support level for different metadata features. This is shown in the chart below.
| Metadata Feature | SAP OLAP BAPI Suport Level |
|---|---|
| Hierarchies | InfoCube/BI Query |
| Basic Key Figures | InfoCube/BI Query |
| Navigational Attributes | BI Query only |
| Display Attributes | InfoCube/BI Query |
| Calculated Key Figures/Formulas | BI Query only |
| Restricted Key Figures | BI Query only |
| Custom Structures | BI Query only |
| Variables | BI Query only |
| Characteristics (incl. Time and Unit) | InfoCube/BI Query |
Ingo gave us a quick demo of the steps involved to build WebI reports:
To use WebI, you have to build a universe and create a connection.
Select the queries/cubes to use. It will build the universe for you.
After the universe is created, export it so that it can be used in a report.
Login to BOBJ InfoView and create a new WebI report.
WebI extracts the data and builds the report. There are many templates and reporting options available.
Variables in WebI has a feature called “Delegated Search”. Rather than see the entire List of Values (and hit the server on the load), you can search for the list of values you want so that the data is queried ahead of time. This increases performance.
WebI is not a ”silver bullet”. You still have to consider preformance and optimization techniques. Do not expose the entire cube to all your users b/c the system will get hammered. Use the same rules for BEx Anaylyzer. Leverage report linking (aggregated report links to more detailed report) and leverage “Drill” for hierarchical reports. If you have a query that is only using two out of ten possible dimensions, it will still process all ten dimensions. The key element to think about is how many cells are being used (dimensions x rows x customers).
Unfortunately, the session ran out of time and everyone was clearly interested in hearing more. The next session by Ingo is a hands on session with Crystal Reports, Xclesius and WebI. We’ll use single sign-on to build a dashboard with live data.
Crystal Reports Books Online!
