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BusinessObjects XI
Performance Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
Performance Management Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Universal Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Embedded Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
Business Objects • BusinessObjects XI: Redefining How Information Empowers Users iii
Executive Summary
The HR department wants to track turnover by geography and monitor monthly hiring costs
Line of business managers want to track daily performance and analyze the efficiency of the
supply chain
Sales managers want to know which regions are offering the most discounts and how that
affects their quota
Business partners want to know which products are selling the fastest so they can guarantee
deliveries
Senior executives want to make sure the charts in their PowerPoint presentations don’t result in
meeting meltdowns because nobody agrees on the data provided
Do any of these situations sound familiar? Can you deliver integrated and reliable information—inside
and outside your organization—in a format that all users can understand? And are you able manage
that from a single management console that allows you to support your performance management,
reporting, and query and analysis end-user requirements?
Introducing BusinessObjects™ XI. With BusinessObjects XI, you can go beyond the limits of
traditional business intelligence (BI) suites. By extending the reach of information to all users in
your organization, BusinessObjects XI redefines the way your organization captures and shares
knowledge. Users get the information they need in a way they understand. And best of all,
information is delivered within their current environment, where they work—accurately and
securely.
BusinessObjects XI allows you to track key business metrics in real time; understand which
actions to take based on timely delivery of trusted data; and manage your operations efficiently
and effectively through better visibility and information transparency.
BusinessObjects XI delivers extreme insight through specialized end-user tools on a single, trusted
business intelligence platform. BusinessObjects XI includes the industry’s best performance
management, reporting, and query and analysis products. These integrated end-user interfaces
are supported by the most reliable, scalable, flexible, and manageable BI platform, and
complemented by unified data integration.
End users have better business visibility with BusinessObjects XI. They can feel confident that
they are achieving their goals on time, and they can easily align individual and group actions
and decisions to the broader organizational strategy. Thanks to a unified view of enterprise
performance, end users can measure what matters most and monitor individual and operational
goals and metrics through intuitive, interactive, and visual displays of information.
BusinessObjects XI allows the IT department to integrate BI into any infrastructure and embed secure
components into virtually any application. With its adaptive, services-oriented architecture, broad data
access, end-to-end metadata, and centralized, web-based administration—BusinessObjects XI is the
best platform to standardize on for all your BI needs and to embed into your existing applications.
Different user segments have different information needs. The cornerstone of an organizational
BI strategy must address the requirements for operational reporting, the more interactive
requirements of query and analysis, and the summarized view that performance management
dashboards and scorecards provide.
Role: IT/business analyst, executive, Role: Developer, designer, IT analyst Role: Ad hoc business analyst
line of business manager
Information relied upon to drive Information relied upon to run and Information relied upon to
enterprise performance through manage the enterprise. understand how the enterprise is
alignment and visibility. performing.
As BI becomes more strategic and enterprise in scope, more and more organizations are providing
graphical dashboards and scorecards that consolidate and deliver actionable information critical
to enterprise performance. These include advanced visual components that can be easily
personalized and linked to analytical or operational reports. This ensures that key metrics always
map to underlying measures, and individual goals map to organizational strategy.
Additionally, many BI end users require either highly-formatted reports that answer known and
predefined questions, or interactive reports that allow them to ask spontaneous and iterative
questions. For example, while many users will only need to receive reports, others will need
sophisticated query and analysis capabilities, and some will need both.
These requirements will not only influence how you deliver BI to your different user communities,
they will also influence the information infrastructure that must be in place to support them. With
specific requirements for performance management, production reporting, and ad hoc query and
analysis, your organization needs optimized end-user interfaces for each specification in order to
maximize both IT and end-user productivity.
Dashboard Manager allows you to roll out personalized dashboards that may contain analytics,
metrics, alerts, and reports in order to present a consolidated view of the business without the
need for programming. Dashboard Manager also includes a catalogue of analytic templates and a
code-free, graphical design environment over the web. These features help to accelerate
deployment so users can begin to monitor their priorities a lot sooner.
BusinessObjects XI delivers
prepackaged analytics and built-in
best practices that help business
users address key organizational
issues and take immediate action.
When delivered within the BusinessObjects Enterprise XI business intelligence platform, you can
publish Crystal reports to the web, view them in portals and applications, and manage and
deploy them using a standardized information infrastructure. With BusinessObjects Enterprise XI,
organizations can deploy Crystal Reports on Windows, UNIX, and Linux platforms.
The highly-productive
Crystal Reports XI
design environment
gives you control and
flexibility over how data
is presented and
formatted.
Crystal Reports XI lets report designers benefit from broader data access, enhancements to the
design environment, and many new features focused on maximizing productivity. Updated XML,
JDBC, DB2, and Microsoft Exchange drivers mean that you are always working with open standards
and benefiting from the latest back-end innovation. Crystal Reports also allows organizations to
leverage their existing investment in the patented Business Objects semantic layer by making the
universe a native data source. This means that report designers can author and distribute highly-
formatted reports based on metadata formerly only available to Business Objects client tools such
as BusinessObjects Web Intelligence™ and BusinessObjects Desktop Intelligence.™
The updated rich text format (RTF) exporting features in the Crystal Reports design environment
make it possible for you to modify reports in any standard word processing application. It’s even
easier to create summary or organizational reports with improved hierarchical grouping, while
new automatic chart generation—based on self-selected variables—helps take the guess work out
of creating charts. With these enhancements, report designers can be as productive as possible.
And a new workbench authoring environment helps designers keep projects organized. Designers
can easily preview reports as they are designed and before they are published to the web, with
one simple step. They can also build in new dynamic cascading prompts that allow report
recipients to easily pinpoint the information they need, when they need it.
Embedded Reporting
Crystal Reports XI continues to innovate in the area that it pioneered—embedded reporting.
Thanks to the support for open standards and extensible SDKs, Crystal Reports can fit seamlessly
into virtually any IT infrastructure. With Crystal Reports, report developers save time on testing
because they can now search for broken links, formula errors, and any existing dependency
issues. This means easier report maintenance. The addition of dynamic cascading prompts also
benefits developers because they can create and distribute a single report for personalization by
multiple users. With Crystal Reports Explorer, elements of end-user interactivity can also be
added to reports that are viewed over the web. And we’ve expanded the Crystal Reports
exporting capabilities within the open SDKs, and added new Java reporting components to
provide even better performance and flexibility.
Query and analysis capabilities empower users to autonomously answer questions as they arise.
This ad hoc query capability is ideal for data analysts and other business users who need self-
service information access with moderate-to-high amounts of interactivity. With tools designed
primarily for enterprise reporting, the scope of information delivery and interactivity is typically
based around the scope of data contained within a given report. Query and analysis solutions
expand the scope of analysis and interactivity to the entire data management system. This can
potentially include terabytes of data stored in a centralized data warehouse, data marts, or
multidimensional OLAP cubes.
A Windows-style interface and menu options allow Web Intelligence XI to extend the reach of
interactivity and analysis capabilities to more users. This interactive interface makes it easy to
quickly format and edit. Users can right-click on a report and do simple things like sorting and
filtering, as well as resizing columns, rows, and charts. And deeper analysis is only a click away.
Users can create variables, edit formulas,
create new reports, tables, and charts as well
as change the graphical display of content.
Best of all, you can enable and disable these
features with security commands, allowing
IT to retain control of user rights and
information access.
Power users can perform speed-of-thought ad hoc OLAP analysis that allows them to
interactively slice and dice, drill, rank, sort, and filter on data, create calculations, and more.
Business users and management can interact with OLAP workbooks over the web using highly
intuitive, summarized graphical views of business activity, guided navigation, and
straightforward data exploration. OLAP Intelligence is integrated with BusinessObjects Enterprise,
providing OLAP drill-through to relational detail and shared security and administration. This
tight platform integration and the ability of OLAP Intelligence to deliver both ad hoc and
managed OLAP analysis make BI standardization possible and ensures that you are getting the
most out of your database investments.
OLAP Intelligence XI
delivers best-of-breed ad
hoc and managed analysis
for today’s leading
multidimensional OLAP
servers.
BusinessObjects Enterprise allows IT to securely manage and control all users in a BI deployment.
It delivers industry-standard support for security entitlement databases, portal integration
frameworks, and Java and .NET platforms. As the use of BI grows inside and outside your
organization, BusinessObjects Enterprise scales to meet the specific information and interactivity
needs of all users. Multi-server support, fault-tolerance, and intelligent load balancing ensure you
can extend information to all users when and how they need it. This BI platform also delivers
multi-level caching, cross-platform support, and comprehensive system administration,
management, and security.
BusinessObjects Enterprise consists of separate, yet interconnected, tiers optimized for specific
tasks. These tiers include the end-user interaction layer, developer services, platform services, and
data services. End users create, edit, and interact with specialized tools. System administrators
manage and monitor the system through the central management console, central configuration
manager, import wizard, publishing wizard, business views designer, and universe designer.
Excel .net
J2EE SDK .NET SDK Web Services
Powerpoint BusinessObjects Enterprise XI is
Word Platform Services a reliable and proven BI platform
Adobe Acrobat
that allows you to deliver extreme
Programs Scheduling Publishing Repository Storage Caching &
insight throughout your
Security
& Alerting & Distribution & Retrieval Failover organization.
Hyperlinks
???
Management Tools Business Rules Performance
Auditing Collaboration Question Engine Management
& Metrics Management Engines
Management
Tools
Migration & Data Services
Importing
BusinessObjects Enterprise also lets you deliver secure, up-to-date business intelligence
information within Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint
presentations. With Live Office, you no longer waste valuable time cutting and pasting formatted
content from one environment to another. And the ability to confidently and securely present
up-to-the-minute information helps you avoid presentation time bombs.
The BusinessObjects Enterprise XI BI platform includes a core set of shared services used across
the product line. Commonly referred to as a services-oriented architecture, this platform has many
advantages including flexibility, scalability with failover and fault tolerance, and extensibility, so
you can add new services without requiring a release of the entire platform. Innovative features,
such as discussion threads, allow for collaborative decision making. Integrated scheduling and
distribution make it easy to deliver information based on events, business calendars, or intervals.
BusinessObjects Enterprise also provides SDKs for enterprise application developers to build
application and portal integrations on top of the platform. We recognize the need for
comprehensive support of different development environments, so BusinessObjects Enterprise XI
provides .NET, Java, COM, and Web Services SDKs. Integration kits for SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan,
and Siebel deliver custom portal integration, powerful data drivers, and tight integration with
application security. And portal integration kits for IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, SAP, and
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Services help deliver insight in virtually any enterprise information
portal environment.
The patented Business Objects semantic layer is the foundation for empowering end-user query
and analysis. It simplifies the complexity of business data by using common business terms,
rather than data language, to access, manipulate, and organize information. These business terms
are stored as objects in a Business Objects universe. Web Intelligence uses the universe to simplify
the user creation process required for simple to complex end-user query and analysis. All
universe objects and connections are stored and secured in the Central Management Console and
require a BusinessObjects Enterprise user login for access to the universe designer interface.
With BusinessObjects XI, Crystal Reports designers can also author universe-based reports.
Upon presenting a query panel for graphical query generation, Crystal Reports designers can
access universes as a data source, create queries graphically through the query panel interface,
and generate rich SQL that can be highly formatted and delivered throughout the organization.
Business Views simplify the report creation experience and interaction by abstracting the
complexity of data for Crystal Reports developers. Business Views also help separate the data
connections, data access, business elements, and the overall business definition giving report
designers granular rights access control. Business Views not only simplify data access for Crystal
Reports designers and developers, they also provide detailed view-time security.
Each universe is a
partial representation of
a database and is
delivered to users in
business language.
To ensure that BI users are always working with accurate and trustworthy information,
BusinessObjects XI includes tightly integrated, industrial-strength data integration technology.
Designed to deliver extreme productivity and scalability, BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI
simplifies and accelerates data extraction, transformation, and loading to and from packaged
applications, real-time message queues, mainframe systems, and relational databases.
Prepackaged data warehouse solutions for enterprise applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft,
Siebel, and Oracle help accelerate BI project deployment and reduce total cost of ownership.
Data Integrator extracts data from source systems and transforms it into a BI-ready format.
Once the transformations are complete, the data is loaded into a target database or application,
and accessed by your end users for reporting, querying, and analysis. Data Integrator is the next
generation of extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) technology. It provides real-time and
batch data movement capabilities and native interfaces to the metadata of packaged enterprise
resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain
management (SCM) applications. Data Integrator also provides a highly-productive single
environment for all of your data integration needs. It incorporates data previewing and
profiling capabilities, and easily integrates with market-leading data cleansing tools.
For your IT department, this means that the right data is easily available to users without the
need for custom coding. This results in dramatically accelerated development times, reduced
maintenance costs, and a greater ROI from your existing packaged applications. Data Integrator
also provides native interfaces to enterprise application integration (EAI) tools and extensive
support for other sources such as relational databases, mainframe and legacy systems, and
technologies such as web services and parallel performance architecture.
It can read data dictionaries, import live metadata (including custom tables and other objects),
and graphically represent this data organized by business process. This lets you easily create data
marts and warehouses from transactional data. Data Integrator also extracts data stored in
proprietary formats, such as hierarchies, and provides prebuilt, reusable transforms in a single,
cohesive environment—regardless of source and target. What’s more, the built-in Data Integrator
real-time engine can pass alerts to end-user management dashboards and intelligently broker data
between the ETL process and the end-user interfaces of BusinessObjects XI.
Data Integrator delivers impact analysis reports that allow developers to follow the data lineage
from the ETL process right through to Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence documents. End-to-
end metadata analysis and the ability to automatically create and update BI metadata help to
insulate downstream users and reports from source changes and data reorganization, resulting in
significant productivity gains and enhanced data credibility. Built-in data validation and auditing
features help ensure that developers are always working with credible data.
BusinessObjects XI delivers information that works the way you do and empowers individuals at
every level of the organization to make better decisions. Now you can turn massive data volumes
into both a company asset and a competitive weapon. Thanks to BusinessObjects XI, organizations
around the world can increase their insight, agility, and enterprise performance.
With the industry’s best reporting solution, the HR director receives detailed daily
information that allows him to monitor hiring costs and track turnover by geography
Sales managers can perform discount analysis over time by using market-leading query and
analysis technology to see which regions are discounting the most and understand how that
affects the bottom line
Line of business managers are able to monitor sophisticated dashboards that allow them to
track their KPIs, understand production cycles, and manage seasonal change based on better
control over all parts of the supply chain
The IT department can deliver secure, trustworthy, integrated, and accurate data inside and
outside the organization
With the help of BusinessObjects XI, your organization achieves compliance and the
CFO is happy
The CEO receives a weekly PowerPoint via the corporate portal showing the financial data
that she securely accesses and refreshes in real time
BusinessObjects XI redefines the way information empowers users and delivers extreme insight
through a single, trusted business intelligence platform. With BusinessObjects XI, you can become
a high-performance organization.
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5,555,403; 6,247,008 B1; 6,578,027 B2; 6,490,593; and 6,289,352. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo,
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