August, 2005

What's HOT? Bursting Manager is HOT!

Report Package Booster - Now Released!

Business Objects Technology Partner Information

User Groups

Object Manager - New Features

InfoScheduler - New Features

Instance Manager - New Features

APOS KPI - New Features

Case Study - PolyOne Corporation

APOS BI Tools Suite

What's HOT? Bursting Manager is HOT! *Other than the weather

Currently our most popular download, Bursting Manager is now helping more customers than ever with their report burst and fan requirements. Check it out if you need to either:

Powerful report bursting and distribution in one of two ways:

• single-pass bursting - burst an existing large instance to smaller individual instances and distribute
• multi-pass bursting - schedule one report to burst to separate instances and distribute

For more information about the product and report bursting in general, download this APOS white paper - Report Bursting Strategies

If you want to check out how Bursting Manager security can help your organization, please visit here to request demo download instructions and our current price list.

Report Package Booster - Now Released! *Consolidate reports into one document

User Groups *Ongoing participation

APOS often provides a speaker for regional user groups throughout North America, presenting a topic "Extending BusinessObjects XI and Crystal Enterprise". If your local users group would like to request a speaker for one of your upcoming meetings, please contact Warren Kobbeltvedt at warrenk@apos.on.ca or 604-864-0766.

Upcoming User Group Participation

We're scheduled to participate with these user groups in the near future:

     September 12 – Seattle, Washington
     September 13 – Cleveland, Ohio

Recent User Group Participation

We participated with these user groups recently:

     July 20 – Portland, Oregon

     July 28 – Oakland, California

Sponsoring the Business Objects International User Conference

We hope you're joining us in Orlando - a number of APOS team members will be there and participating! If you're attending, please look us up at the Vendor Fair where we're showing all our APOS BI Tools - with some new solutions being shown for the first time! Visit here or the image below for additional information and to register.

Object Manager for BusinessObjects XI and Crystal Enterprise *Powerful new features added

To check out how Object Manager can help your organization, please visit here to request demo download instructions and our current price list.

Case Study - PolyOne Corporation *Cool customer “A void needed to be filled; APOS BI Tools were very user friendly and were exactly what we needed” said Bill Peeler, business warehouse manager at PolyOne Corporation, Avon Lake, Ohio when asked about how easy it was to implement the APOS BI Tools.

APOS BI Tools Fill Monitoring and Security Need for PolyOne

Tools Used:

APOS Instance Manager and APOS Object Manager

Background:
PolyOne is a leading global polymer services company—providing customers with specialty thermoplastic compounds, polymer formulations, color and additive systems, screen-printing inks, vinyl compounds, and thermoplastic resin distribution. The company’s polymer products are utilized in a variety of markets and end-use applications—including consumer and industrial packaging, wiring, food and beverage containers, custom-molded parts, automobile interiors and exteriors, medical packaging, vinyl siding and decking, housewares, sporting goods, and electronics.

PolyOne wanted to provide its sales team with information from its data warehouse, in the form they needed, when they needed it. “A large percentage of our sellers had a difficult time pulling reports directly from the data warehouse due to frequent travel and inexperience with the toolset. They relied on a network of reporting contacts to assist them in obtaining key information. We needed a mechanism to push reports out to these sellers on a regular basis and in a consistent format.” says Bill Peeler, business warehouse project manager, PolyOne.

Challenge:
PolyOne implemented Crystal Enterprise 10 to offer their sales team easy access to information from their SAP data warehouse. The daily monitoring of reports became cumbersome as more reports were created and the user base increased. Reports were running 24-7 and PolyOne wanted to be proactive in response to any failed executions as personnel depend on these reports to make timely decisions.

PolyOne utilizes SAP Authentication linked with Crystal Enterprise to avoid duplication of security roles outside of their SAP Business Warehouse (BW) system. The management of security is critical in ensuring personnel see only the information they should have access to. Each time reports and roles from SAP BW are updated, several manual updates are required in Crystal Enterprise to reset security appropriately. The default procedure to update SAP Authentication security in Crystal Enterprise is time-consuming and there is not a method to update security across multiple objects at the same time. For this reason, it was more prone to errors.

PolyOne was confronted with purchasing or developing something in-house to fill the gaps in the monitoring and security maintenance process. Business Objects consultants demonstrated the capability to extend Crystal Enterprise with custom development and also recommended APOS Systems as a possible solution. PolyOne researched additional vendors offering solutions in this area and compared the toolsets. It became clear that APOS BI Tools were the most user-friendly, cost-effective solution when compared to other vendors or developing their own solution.

Solution:
PolyOne needed to enhance the monitoring capabilities for Crystal Enterprise, which is why they purchased APOS Systems’ Instance Manager. With reports running 24-7, some as frequent as every 15 minutes, it is critical to know when there are failed reports in order to be proactive in correcting them. Instance Manager provides the capability to view reports filtered by report status, date, and other report characteristics in a friendly user interface. When failures occur, Instance Manager is used to restart the reports while providing the capability to change any of the report parameters.

PolyOne also installed APOS Systems’ Object Manager to allow them to quickly validate security roles and reports with the desired authorization. “Administrative updates that would take a few minutes to update in Object Manager would take several hours to a day to complete manually through the ePortfolio interface. Without the tool, we would have to manually go into each report and folder in the entire system each time we wanted to perform a system-wide check or change. This is very time consuming and it is also easy to overlook something.” said Bill.

Why APOS?
“A void needed to be filled; APOS BI Tools were very user friendly and were exactly what we needed” said Bill Peeler when asked about how easy it was to implement the APOS BI Tools.

To read the full PolyOne case study or view others, visit here.

APOS BI Tools Suite *Extend BusinessObjects XI and Crystal Enterprise

One of our challenges is keeping our customers and colleagues current on the APOS BI Tools suite as it grows. Visit here to request demo download instructions and our current price list.

Administration - System Monitoring . . .

Instance Monitor - email notification of failed instances

KPI - creates metadata for analysis - who is viewing which reports, license usage analysis, server activity monitoring and more

Administration - Scheduling . . .

Bursting Manager - burst a large instance into small ones, burst one report to many

InfoScheduler - power batch scheduling from Microsoft Excel

Administration - Instance Administration . . .

Archive Manager - report instance archiving with business rules, with restore capability!

Instance Manager - administrator power tool for managing large instance systems

Administration - System Administration . . .

Object Manager - report promotion, object management, security maintenance

Extending the User Interface . . .

Dynamic Parameters - SQL-based, user-specific pick lists, cascading parameters

Extending Distribution . . .

Processing Extension RAD - fast track processing extension development

Suggestions, Requests, Unique Requirements

If you have a unique reporting system requirement, let us know. We love to work on special projects and regularly save our customers a lot of time and money by using APOS BI Tools as a fast-track foundation for a specific customized solution.