Product Description

If your objective in business intelligence reporting is Business Objects success, this is the resource for you. Gives a thorough run-down of the software, plus coverage of Web intelligence, complex queries, multidimensional analysis, and more. Author Cindi Howson has plenty of hands-on experience with the product.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #326992 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 770 pages

From the Back Cover

The Definitive Resource on BusinessObjects

Covers BusinessObjects administrator and end-user tools for query, reporting, and analysis

Improve profitability and operations in your company by leveraging BusinessObjects with help from this comprehensive guidebook. Divided into three digestible sections, Business Objects: The Complete Reference will help you get fully acquainted with this sophisticated tool set, design and build a user-friendly interface, then reap the rewards of reporting and analysis. Learn how to align your implementation with business goals, define user segments, devise the best deployment strategy, and design and build your universe to ensure success. Finally, create reports that will help you explore and analyze data, make complex queries, and improve business decision-making and execution based on one of the leading business intelligence tools.

• Determine your goals and implement a BusinessObjects deployment strategy
• Use marketing techniques to boost BusinessObjects usage
• Create the appropriate business representation of your data warehouse or transaction database
• Enhance your universe with custom hierarchies and drill through to detail
• Design insightful reports using tables, charts, breaks, and formulas
• Access, analyze, and explore huge amounts of data to improve profitability and manage costs
• Translate a business question into an efficient query
• Customize the portal to create a simple Web-based dashboard

About the Author
Cindi Howson (Midland, MI) holds an MBA from Rice University and has more than 14 years of IT experience. Howson has specialized in data warehousing and business intelligence for over 8 years. Howson began to work with BusinessObjects in 1994 and has led global implementations of BusinessObjects for thousands of users. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Howson held various IT and management positions at Dow Chemical and Deloitte & Touche.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
As with previous user found book to be sadly lacking in depth. Automation is an essential feature of Business Objects. If you're not automating elements of your reports then you are not using BO to its full potential. This book completely neglects automation and I found its lightning forays into the world of star schemas and data warehousing dangerous for anybody approaching this area for the first time.

The level the book was pitched at varied between extremely high level and extremely low-level. There never seemed to be any happy ground inbetween. There was no mention of performance tuning as such and the Webi section was virtually non-existent.
Verison 6 is not covered.

Business Objects Complete Refernce?
Once again dissapointed by Osbornes Complete Reference series. I dont know why I continue to buy this range. As with the VB6 complete reference, this is not actually a complete reference. A fact that is not outlined clearly is the VBA factor behind B/O. I wish to create and deploy Universes and automate a collection of reporting requirements - No mention here. Manual instruction in this book is OK, but, it does not even mention VBA, or any kind of automation. I do find these books annoying when they say "COMPLETE REFERENCE" because they are not. Still, for the new user trying to get a handle on general functionality then this book would suit as there are no others. However, if you are looking at large universe and report deployment with automated procedures and programming into any microsoft products then I would suggest you give this a miss.

It's Not A Training Manual
This book is good to give you the fundamental principles in Business Intelligence. But it's not a book on how to use BusinessObjects itself. Check out the books by Robert D Schmidt if that's what you really need to know.