BusinessObjects Wildfire at a Swiss Bank

1
BusinessObjects Wildfire at a Swiss Bank

• .
• Get Your BusinessObjects Deployment Under Control
• Klaus BINDER
• Technical Director and Product Manager

2
Customer Background

• Niche player in Banking with about 1,500
  employees
• Assets under management - 200 Billion
• Specialize in Bond issues and Institutional
  Brokerage
• No retail or international network
• Unit specializes on  Event Management 

3
Technical Background

• Database standard is Sybase
• Novell network
• Many applications (bought, customized or
  in-house)
• Windows 2000
• Crystal Hollos reporting
• Applications
• Financial reporting (Accounting)
• Trading desk
• Front back office applications
• Event Management System

4
BusinessObjects History

• 2000 - BusinessObjects introduced by the Finance
  department
• Replaced Crystal as front-end on Financial
  Warehouse
• 2001 - BO is being used by many different groups
  on many databases
• Mid 2001 - 9 BO repositories exist within the
  bank, no global strategy many security issues,
• End 2001 - Down to 3 repositories (DEV, UA, Prod)
• 2002 - Creation of a central team to manage the
  BO infrastructure
• Mid 2003 - Major corruption of a production
  universe at month end peak. 50 users without data
  for 2 days

5
Challenge 1

• Every Group wanted to manage its own
  infrastructure
• No standards
• No formal process
• Duplication of work and end user confusion
• Limited willingness to share information between
  teams
• Redundant infrastructure planned
• Every group wanted a Webi and BCA server
• No team with mandate to coordinate and integrate
  BO

6
Solution 1

• BO Administrators showed little interest in
  monitoring
• Afraid to be blamed for bad design
• Concerns about possible security issues
• Seen as a solution to spy on users
• Security Office is in charge of corporate
  security
• Very interested to understand who accesses which
  data
• Global requirement to monitor database access
• No overview on current usage
• Security Office purchased the licenses for BO and
  Windows
• Understand BO usage and its requirements
• Windows application usage tracking to optimize
  support and maintenance

7
Initial Benefits

• Identify all BO users in ALL environments
• Some of the reports were delivered by an
  application vendor
• User sharing was discovered (forbidden by
  corporate policy)
• Overview of Extend to BO usage
• Universe Tracking
• Most critical universes are highlighted
• Number of inactive objects in universes
• Inactive universes
• User usage measures
• Identification of key users and their usage
  pattern
• Inactive users (lack of training, user who left
  the bank, )
• Identify non-universe Sources

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Benefits -18 month

• User-sitting /user care
• Based on usage patterns suggest appropriate BO
  profiles
• Dispatch of documents by e-mail/PDF
• Suggest relevant training
• Universe Tracking
• Track unused objects over time and remove if not
  relevant
• Track acceptance and usage of new projects
• Improve the universe and/or the database
• Usage patterns
• Long term overview of usage trends
• Critical time periods (month end, closing, )
• Updates to SLA agreements

9
Architecture

• Enterprise Manager for BusinessObjects
  architecture

BO
Webi / BCA
BO
Zabo
Windows
BO Unv reports
10
Implementation and Architecture

• Add-in Deployment
• Initial Novell Packaged pushed on the BO PCs
• Part of the BO Standard Package
• Installed Manually on the BCA and Webi servers
• EM Server
• The process runs on an NT server of the IT
  security team
• Time delayed data loading (every night from 9PM
  to 3 AM)
• Shared folder on a corporate file server (about
  9,000 files per day)
• EM Database
• MS SQL Server 2000 (not dedicated IT security
  BOX)
• 10 GB of data/year
• No current plans to aggregate / delete data

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Enterprise Manager for BusinessObjects
Report Samples
12
Overview Report
13
Overview Report
14
Overview Report
15
Challenge 2

• Version Control and release management
• No standards
• No formal process
• Different expectations about approach
• BO is like Excel approach
• Internal Teams pushing Documentum and PVCS
• No understanding of BO specific issues
• Not seen as a priority once 3 BO environments had
  been created
• There is still no undo (if you release the wrong
  release to production)
• The migration process can take a lot of time

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Solution 2

• BO Administrators saw no big benefit to a
  standard process
• So far it was easy to make changes
• Afraid of bureaucratic overkill (It takes 2-3
  weeks to create an e-mail)
• Universes never change once they are created
• Limited experience with BO
• Universes never changed (the initial universes
  had 1,500 objects)
• Reporting is an end user problem and IT does not
  care about it
• Tracking of changes is not important
• There are work requests and change requests
• Every change is based on a formal request which
  is documented

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Initial Benefits

• Pilot project was defined
• Be able to recover future corruptions
• Inventory of existing universes
• New project used VM intensively
• Several Designers worked on the same universe
• Easy to see changes and who was working on it
• Cut down on development time and universe
  hand-over
• Release of universe
• It was suddenly easy to move universes to the
  repositories
• Up-to-date environments and easier to work with

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Benefits - 6 month

• Formal process to release universes
• All universes are now released to production by
  the same time
• Validation check before release.
• Ticked and change request updates
• Change tracking
• Easy to follow changes of universes and compare
  them usage data
• Impact Analysis
• Tracking of used versions of reports
• User acceptance
• Very positive user feedback
• Heavy usage of the tool (it has become the entry
  point for BO Developers)

19
Architecture

• VersionManager for BusinessObjects Architecture

BO SDK
20
Implementation and Architecture

• Add-in Deployment
• Initial Novell package pushed on the BO PCs
• Part of the BO standard package (planned for
  5.1.8 or 6.x?)
• VM Server
• Not installed at this point
• Users have to follow the process and cant do it
  as batch
• Some users start to complain about performance
  and push for the server
• VM Database
• MS SQL Server 2000 (Not Dedicated Database)
• Delete only allowed by root user
• Users start to version their personal documents

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Version Manager for BusinessObjects
Report Samples
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Overview Report
23
Change Comments
24
Transfer History
25
Thank You
Q A Product Demo
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For Future Questions
Klaus Binder Product Manager klaus.binder_at_ebiex
perts.com