CRN : Daily Archives : Hyperion Intros Business Intelligence Platform, Debuts Linux Support : 3:45 PM EST Tues., Feb. 24, 2004

CRN : Daily Archives : Hyperion Intros Business Intelligence Platform, Debuts Linux Support : 3:45 PM EST Tues., Feb. 24, 2004 describes Hyperion's first "end-to-end" offering of a business intelligence solution after their purchase of Brio. Most importantly, there is no end to licensing fees in this scenario :) All the more reason to look at Analysis Services, and have someone knowledgeable enough in tthe environment to understand the seperation of the back end from the frontend.

PCWorld.com - Internet Tips: A Grown-Up's Guide to Instant Messaging

PCWorld.com - Internet Tips: A Grown-Up's Guide to Instant Messaging is just what it claims to be. Outlines the negatives of the public networks very well!

FIMA - Home - Welcome

FIMA, the Financial Services IM Association, is a group of major financial organizations addressing interoperability issues between companies (specifically, for active trading groups and brokers.) They have released some new guidelines for interoperability, which are very strightforward, but worth a look.

Sidebar: Instant Messaging: Spammers' Next Target - Computerworld

Sidebar: Instant Messaging: Spammers' Next Target - Computerworld addresses the inevitable - IM spam. Best defense - use an internal private network for business use. The bot scene is the natural breeding ground for IM spam, but fortunately it all revolves arouns "passive" messaging right now, versus "active" messaging, where the bot initiates the conversation.

Overview of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in SQL Server Yukon

Overview of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in SQL Server Yukon has some good info. Yukon's DTS should be a full-fledged ETL tool.

InfoWorld: Enterprise instant messengers make the grade: February 20, 2004: By Curtis Franklin Jr.,Brian CheeandMike Heck: Applications

InfoWorld: Enterprise instant messengers make the grade: February 20, 2004: By Curtis Franklin Jr.,Brian CheeandMike Heck: Applications has a comparison of Enterprise versions of IBM Lotus, MS Comm Server, Groupwise IM, and Jabber. It's the first write-up I have seen on Groupwise.

Redlands Daily Facts - Business

Redlands Daily Facts - Business: "Smart new products prove instant messaging is a killer app" is a report from the DEMO conference, commenting how many applications now inclkude some form of presence display. I have seen this in the latest version of Sharepoint Portal Server 2003, where, for example, on a project web page, all the team members are listed, showing their online status (through MSN). It is very slick, and very useful. Hotmail already has this feature, and open source message boards have had it for a long time.

One quote:

``Every major software company knows they need to integrate presence and IM into their applications,'' said Jon Sakoda of IMLogic, a company featured at DEMO.

Don't know about that....

It's easy enough to do, there are libraries out there (or you can hack out the code from phorum or phpBB or another BB) and hack in your own solution. On a side note, this could be a drawback for alot of the niche players, such as Groupwise's IM, Facetime, or another third-party, proprietary solution, as no doubt they will struggle to keep up with these kinds of innovations.

Visual Mining Web reports

Business Intelligence Solutions shows a dashboard app using Visual Mining tools. It looks very slick, and is delivered over the web through Java applets.

Technically, looks like it has an app server back end, probably to produce the graphs/images on the fly, while raw data sats are passed within the HTML to the plug-ins (instructions for ASP, PHP, etc integration about half way down.) This looks very cool, and delivering over the web is important... depending on the price and real-world performance this might be worth a look as an easily customizable dashboard toolkit.

IMlogic :: Free Instant Messaging Detector

IMlogic :: Instant Messaging Infrastructure has a link to their free IM detector tool. IM Detector reports logon attempts, messages sent, messages received, file transfer requests made, and file transfer requests received over the major IM networks. It also detects Gnutella and FastTrack file sharing info.

I just tried it and it works pretty well. It can be set to monitor HTTP proxy traffic too. Definitely a good way to prove that every company needs a policy put in place asap, because this shows will show there's little doubt that people in just about every company are using Public IM. What it doesn't do is record who is using IM (although it looks like it will with P2P apps). The reporting page is nice, running on port 8090 and accessible with a web browser (a feature every app should emulate imo).

Why So Many Business Intelligence Initiatives Fail

Why So Many Business Intelligence Initiatives Fail
is an article on DMReview with a few good points.

Specifically, the content delivered by many BI projects often does not need to be used by anyone. In fact, many BI projects have to constantly work to attract customers (or clients) who will hopefully be involved in the BI projects throughout their lifecycle. Typically, these clients must see the opportunity to leverage the information delivered by the BI project. This is in contrast to a mission-critical operational system that is inextricably tied into a key business process. As a result, what’s required in a successful BI project is for key executives, managers and other members of the organization to want to make use of what a BI project delivers.

One thing not mentioned here is the importance of the front end in finding users. In my experience, find a good, easy to use OLAP front end, show a KPI-over-the-last-year line graph for a number of products, and any solution will sell itself. Probably the best that I have run across is Databeacon, which has a version that connects to Analysis Services. It comes in the form of a web page plug-in, and requires no client installation, and is extremely intuitive. The graphic capabilities are what set it apart.

The thin web client that comes in the SQL Server Resource Kit is also nice as a free tool to demonstrate the type of data available from a cube.

Siebel Analytics

Found this presentation that is a very good overview of Siebel Analytics.... it is a Siebel presentation, so there is some Siebel hype, but it is still very good since I never felt I had a complete picture.

23 Business Intelligence Tips

Just came across 23 Business Intelligence Tips, in the March 2004 issue of SQL Server mag. It has some very good tips.

There's also a good introduction to MDX here.

Windows Server System Magazine- Tracking the Business Intelligence Market

To continue on the use-what-you-own thought... the fact that MS has released Reporting Services for SQL Server is significant - for companies that own SQL Server 2000, they have a complete enterprise-class reporting suite right under their noses.

Nice article that makes some good points in this area. Also some comments from early adopters.

I will be learning a bit more about Reporting Services March 3 at an MS seminar.

MS Analysis Services is an amazing product... Just about every mid-size and up company owns this (as part of SQL Server 2000 EE) and I don't think any of them realize that they are sitting on a fully fledged OLAP platform. Literally, many larger companies already own the technology to completely transform the way the use data for decision making, but so few people actually understand what it takes to put the theory into action that no one realizes it.

I've been pushing people to consider its use for a couple of years now at my company, and have finally started making some headway. I have found (partly by luck) that Six Sigma project managers are perfect candidates and users - they are trained to eat up data, create statistics from the rawest data possible, and find trends and problem spots, all of which is a perfect fit for OLAP.

It is easy enough to make a cube from any data source, but sums, distinct counts, and averages, although showing immediate insight are just the tip of the iceberg. SOme other measures that can used to great effect in any cube with a little MDX knowledge are:

Median (using the Median function)
Change from ParallelPeriod - [Amount]-[ParallelPeriod([Year]),[Amount]) (link)
Standard Deviation - Stdev(Set[, Numeric Expression])
Moving averages - Avg(Time.CurrentMember.Lag(14):Time.CurrentMember, [Closing Price]) (link)

I plan to include these as measures in nearly every cube for now on... anyone looking for insight in to their data will eat it all up.

I am the author of the SDBA Revolution Instant Messaging Application Server, a (relatively) popular IM bot. It is coming up on 2000 downloads off sourceforge. What makes it different from nearly all others is the built in workflow to guide end-user interaction, and the integration of the web-scripting paradigm. It also abstracts out the IM protocol, so an app written for MSN can run on AIM with no changes at all, except the logon information.

I have added a few unique features lately... I personally use Mobile MSN a lot, mostly as a means for my Aussie girl to send me an SMS when I am not on the computer. The Mobile MSN feature uses a different, parallel messaging system from normal MSN, and it always frustrated me a bit that this support wasn't included in any bot libraries, so I hacked it in the Perl lib myself after reading up on the paging protocol. If you are interested in such things grab the library and sample bot.

I also added in the capability to pass starting config info on the command line. Next Monday I will release a version with an "external integration" feature, that will take an XML file dropped in a certain directory and process it, spitting it out through the bot to the designated recipient. The reason for both of these enhancements is to allow some simple integration with other applications... Although the main reason is because I would like to make an open source web-based IM client, to allow any one anywhere to set up their own web client, and maybe throw a wrench into all the school and work firewalls out there :) There are a few out there (like E-Messenger or MSN2GO), but they are rare enough to be blocked fairly quickly.

On thing I wonder though... the MSN crowd had latched on to this, and while I understand AIM has more users, I don't know of any of my users that run the bot on AIM.

Decided to get on the bandwagon and see what all the blogging hype is all about. This blog will be mostly something for me to jot down links and impressions of the IM bot scene and OLAP/BI things, both pretty cutting edge, with a million different view points, and with not an awful lot of organized resources yet.

For a little more about me, visit my home page.