PRESENTATIONS

Keynote Thursday: What’s New in Hyperion 11.1.2.1, OBIEE 11g, and Smart View

For our keynote presentation, three of the original Oracle ACE Directors in the world of OBIEE and Hyperion will discuss all that the most recent releases have to offer. The session will begin with Edward Roske discussing all the new things in Hyperion 11.1.2.1. While it may sound like a patch release, it's so much more than that. Edward will cover the new features available in Essbase, Planning, and HFM. Some of the high-level improvements to be discussed will include Essbase ASO calc scripts, new Essbase BSO functions to push data to other cubes and return log messages, and Planning’s new workflow capabilities. The session will spend some time covering the new applications in 11.1.2 including Financial Close Management, Disclosure Management, ERP Integrator, and Public Sector Budgeting.

Tim Tow will take over to cover all the features in Smart View that you may have heard of (like using Smart View inside Microsoft Outlook), as well as several on the horizon like how to make Smart View look a whole lot like the old Essbase Excel Add-In. 

Finally, Mark Rittman will go through all of the high-level improvements to the reporting and analysis side of the Oracle EPM product suite (OBIEE 11g Answers & Dashboards, Interactive Reporting, Financial Reporting, Web Analysis & Workspace). OBIEE 11g is the most significant release of the Oracle BI products since Oracle first acquired the various products that make up the OBIEE suite. Mark will review what makes OBIEE 11g the future for reporting and ad-hoc analysis. Now that Hyperion 11.1.2.1 and OBIEE 11g are out, you can come to this presentation to learn everything you're missing so you can beg your boss to at least upgrade your development server.

Keynote Friday: OBIEE 11g Integration with Essbase
PRESENTATION
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting
The 11g release of Oracle Business Intelligence features improved integration with the Essbase OLAP server, and the Hyperion EPM environment. This session will look in detail at how this integration works, and discuss what features work well, and which ones still need improving. The session will look also at how suitable Oracle Business Intelligence is as an end-user query environment, and answer the question as to whether OBIEE dashboards can replace Web Analysis, Financial Reporting and Smart View.

BI Stream

OBIEE 11g RPD Modeling New Features & Best Practices
PRESENTATION
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting
The 11g release of Oracle Business Intelligence introduces a number of new repository features including support for complex hierarchies, support for Oracle OLAP and Essbase data sources, lookup tables, and other new features. In addition, there are a number of best practices and design guidelines for the repository that still hold true, throughout all versions of the product. This presentation will look at these best practices, how these new features can best be used in repositories, and take a look at how OLAP Server metadata can be incorporated into your enterprise repository models.

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Oracle Business Intelligence Applications  – Tips and Tricks
PRESENTATION & Demo videos can be found here.
Chenly Paz, James and Monroe
Watch us run through some key tips and tricks to ensuring your Business Intelligence applications are performing well and being customized according to Oracle standards. Get a look at the new Business Intelligence applications for OBIEE 11.1.1.

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Spatial Analysis – Tips, Techniques, and Advanced Features of Integration with Spatial
PRESENTATION
Chetan Khimjee, Oracle Corporation
OBIEE 11g introduced a new visualization type called Map Views that allows users to visualize their analytics data using maps. This session will go into a deep dive and show how intuitive it is in bringing visualization to the world of Business Intelligence. Custom data will be used to show some of the tips and techniques in creating different map-view and how this can be visualized in OBIEE using numerous formatting options. Integration with Google Maps and use of advanced spatial functions will round out this session.

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Getting Started with OBIEE 11g Dashboards, Scorecards and Mapping
PRESENTATION
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting
Oracle Business Intelligence 11g provides an updated user interface plus new ad-hoc reporting, publishing, dashboard, and alerting features. In addition, the new scorecarding and KPI capabilities provide the ability to describe business objectives and progress towards meeting them. This session details these new features, through demonstrations and discussion, and shows how they can be used to make compelling interactive BI environments for users at all levels.

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Agile Data Warehousing using Exadata & OBIEE 11g
PRESENTATION
Stewart Bryson, Rittman Mead Consulting
In agile project management methodologies, user stories describe desired content and functionality delivered and verified in a short amount of time. But traditional data warehouse projects struggle to deliver completed user stories due to the complexity of the intermingled moving parts: data modeling; extract, transform, and load (ETL); front-end development; and a Q & A process that needs to validate the data from source to target.

Combining the logical modeling capabilities of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, the brute force of the Oracle Database Machine, and the "smart"-ness of Oracle Exadata Storage Server provides the power and flexibility to drive the completion of user stories within the standard time frames demanded by agile projects.

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BI Publisher 11g – Delivering Innovation & Powerful Analysis Through the Web
PRESENTATION
Chetan Khimjee, Oracle Corporation
OBIEE 11g introduced the concept of creating and editing your own templates online, then using this template in creating a highly formatted report through the online layout builder, thus reducing the dependency on Microsoft Word. This session will touch upon all these concepts and will begin by creating a data model, creating a template, and showing the powerful analysis which is achieved by using the new Interactive Viewer. Advanced new features will be touched upon to complete the innovation achieved by BI Publisher.

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OBIEE 11g Deployment and Change Management Best Practices
PRESENTATION
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting
Once an Oracle BI system has been deployed, administrators will need to migrate the system between environments, manage change to the repository and catalog, and place BI objects and metadata under version control. This presentation sets out a best practice approach to Oracle BI project lifecycle and change management, using the 11g release and new features such as Oracle WebLogic Server Admin Console and Scripting Tool, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and new business intelligence features such as repository and catalog patching. This session will look at migrating business intelligence, and application server artifacts between environments, and will put this process within the wider context of database and middleware environment management.

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OBIEE Usage Tracking and Server Tracking – Tips and Tricks
PRESENTATION
Chenly Paz & Anthony Stefanac, James and Monroe
This presentation will show you the how to track what your users are doing within your OBIEE environment, including server-based metrics, to allow you to understand how your servers are dealing with load. It will also cover linking Oracle Business Intelligence Loads and performance monitoring.

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Upgrading from OBIEE 10g to 11g - Technical and Project Tips and Tricks
PRESENTATION
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting
Upgrading from the 10g release of OBIEE to the 11g is relatively simple using the Upgrade Assistant, but complications can arise when your repository is complicated and you have many custom reports. This presentation takes a look at the upgrade process, and provides tips and tricks from both a technical and project approach perspective.

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Integrating OBIEE and ADF using the Action Framework
PRESENTATION
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting
OBIEE 11g includes the Action Framework, a set of integration points for integrating BI functionality with applications and business processes. A significant focus of this integration is with Oracle's Application Developer Framework (ADF), with Oracle BI embeddable in an ADF application, and for the ADF application to make use of the Action Framework to leverage BI functionality. This presentation will look at how a BI dashboard can integrate and work with an ADF application, how ADF applications can trigger BI agents and actions, and how ADF data and business logic can be accessed by Oracle BI, culminating in a demo of an integrated ADF/BI application.

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Aggregation: Oracle Business Intelligence Server Versus Oracle Optimizer
PRESENTATION
Stewart Bryson, Rittman Mead Consulting
Aggregate navigation describes the functionality BI systems have for using summary-level data instead of detail-level data for faster data access and report performance. When using Oracle Business Intelligence 11g and Oracle Database 11g, we can choose which process should handle summary management and the navigation between the different levels: Oracle Business Intelligence Server or the Oracle Optimizer.

Both methods support full summary management functionality, and either one is robust enough for an enterprise data warehouse. So which one should we use? This presentation walks the attendees through both options and investigates the different design paradigms that may favor one implementation over the other.

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Driver-Based Planning and Optimization Tricks
PRESENTATION
Sachin Joshi, James and Monroe
Want to know some design and optimization tricks used by consultants to take your Hyperion Planning implementation to the next level? This session will include key tips and tricks that we use for design, implementation, and administration of Hyperion Driver-Based Planning including what drives the number of applications and plan types, sharing data across applications and plan types, and enhancing the end user experience. The session will also provide an overview of Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) and how you can use HPCM along with Planning to deliver a more comprehensive solution. 

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Unleashing the Power of Essbase in Excel
PRESENTATION
Tim Tow, Applied OLAP
Excel was the original user interface for Essbase and remains the most popular user interface for Essbase data. Attend this session by Tim Tow, Oracle ACE Director, and learn techniques, tips, and tricks to make Essbase spreadsheets easier to create, easier to maintain, and more performant using both the classic Excel Essbase add-in and Smart View. Tim, who was also one of five charter Microsoft Excel MVPs worldwide, has sixteen years of Essbase spreadsheet experience, wrote some of the original Excel/Essbase demoware, and has helped thousands of users over the years.

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Making Your Life Easier with EPM Utilities
PRESENTATION
Wayne Fallows & Anthony Stefanac, James and Monroe
This session will provide an overview of all the interesting utilities you may or may not be using as part of your day-to-day jobs. This session covers utilities such as Life Cycle Management, Planning Loader, HFM Copy Application Utility, upgrading applications from classic to EPMA mode, EPMA data synchronization, and some custom utilities that just don’t come with the software.

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Optimizing Essbase Formulas & Calc Scripts
PRESENTATION
Edward Roske, interRel Consulting
Some people want to optimize their Essbase cubes for calculation performance. Others want to improve the performance of retrievals. In this session, you'll learn how to speed up your member formulas in BSO and ASO, as well as your BSO calc scripts, while not significantly harming the performance of your retrieves. This session will cover which functions to use in which situations, when to use SET commands, how to take proper advantage of parallel calculation, and how outline order affects calculation performance significantly. The session will discuss how some commands are the devil's work, how that whole "FIX on sparse, IF on dense" thing is bogus, and some tips and tricks for using functions in ways God never intended. If you want to learn to optimize the entire calculation engine in Essbase from the world's foremost expert in Essbase calcs, then don’t miss this session.

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Hyperion Financial Management Detailed Rules, Customizations, and Optimization Tricks
PRESENTATION
Riaan Hechter & Wayne Fallows, James and Monroe
This session will give you the tuning and optimization guidelines used by consultants when implementing Financial Management. In addition, this session will also run through some detailed consolidation rules examples, HFM customizations, and optimization tricks to ensure your system doesn’t overload. 

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Oracle Hyperion Planning: Best Practices Designing Data Forms
PRESENTATION
Edward Roske, interRel Consulting
Whether you've already implemented Planning or you're about to do so, you need to know how to design a data form that looks good, is easy to use, and pulls up data quickly. What is the best way to design a Planning data form that your planners will enjoy using? How can you utilize composite forms? Can you combine data from different plan types? How can you improve performance? When should you use calculated columns and some of those cool new traffic lighting features? What is the best way to set up data forms so that they work well in Excel? This session will answer these questions and more in this informative deep dive on Planning data forms.

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Upgrading from 9x to 11.1.2
PRESENTATION
Richard Philipson, James and Monroe
Want to know some key learnings from upgrading EPM from 9x to the current version? This session will run you through some key tips and tricks to allow your upgrade to go more efficiently and effectively.

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The Exception to the Rule: Essbase Design Principles That Don’t Always Apply
PRESENTATION
Edward Roske, interRel Consulting
Fix on sparse, if on dense; hourglass vs. hourglass on a stick. Just when you thought you had all of the Essbase design best practices down, here comes Edward Roske, Oracle ACE Director, with some exceptions to the general Essbase rules. Join us for this unique twist on an Essbase tips and tricks presentation where we will share some of the “exceptions” to consider when designing and implementing Essbase. Test your Essbase knowledge and make sure you know all of the considerations when applying design and tuning principles.

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Hyperion Financial Reporting: Top Ten Tips and Tricks
PRESENTATION
Edward Roske, interRel Consulting
There are those who say that the reports in Hyperion Financial Reporting cannot be sped up. They are the speed they are and it's all based on how much data you're seeing in the reports. While the number one thing you can do to speed up your reports is to speed up your data source, there are at least ten major things you can do to speed up your report itself. From proper positioning of dimensions to appropriate use of conditional formatting, there are ways to improve the performance of your reports in both HTML and PDF! The session will close with the hot features in 11.1.2 that will improve and speed your FR reports even more. 

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Best Practices for Expanding Essbase with the APIs
Tim Tow, Applied OLAP
The Essbase API is what elevates Essbase beyond being just a product and turns it, instead, into a platform. Customers can leverage the Essbase APIs to finely tailor their Essbase experiences, and can range from simple automations to full applications. Join one of the world’s most experienced Essbase API developers, Oracle ACE Director Tim Tow, and learn best practices for using both the Essbase VB API and the Essbase Java API.

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