Hyperion and Quantitative Analysis
Discipline, rigor, and investigation allow you to commit to quantitative deliverables. The numbers allow people to make the decisions supported by decision support systems. Hyperion Interactive Reporting and Hyperion training allow you to buendild reports and dashboards that progress toward the end goal. Make your Hyperion interactive reporting decisions promote business value.
Oracle Fusion
With Hyperion Interactive Reporting hanging on, Oracle released its Fusion Edition Enterprise Performance Management release. Essbase has been enhanced getting a new Oracle Essbase design. This is the step needed to bring Essbase and Oracle together. Is it integrated? That is the question. All our mega vendors are working to integrate their BI offerings with the performance management products. Integration is on the way, but we may not be there yet.
BI Sales in 2008
Last year the Business Intelligence market grew to just over $7 billion. The big three are Business Objects, recently acquired by SAP, Cognos, recently acquired by IBM, and Oracle, which acquired Hyperion Interactive Reporting last year. Microsoft holds the number four position in BI with bundled SQL Reporting Services. Are people waiting for all these acquisitions to settle before investing in 2008?
Problem with ACT! and Word 2007 templates
“This is a known issue” I was told when I called tech support. I had opened an existing document template, made some changes and then wanted to do a Save As to enter a unique name for the document-no such luck! There is a work around-when you want to do the save use Save As and put quotes around the entire name. So, if your document was badtemplate and you wanted to name it goodtemplate type: “good template.adt” and click OK. The file is saved as expected.
ACT! 2008 and Palm
With the release of 10.2 update for ACT!, you can confidently get ACT for Palm and go wild. It is trouble free as far as I can tell and no my Palm is always up to date. To get the Update, Open ACT and open the Help menu and select Update. The download takes about 2 minutes. To get ACT for Palm, go to www.act.com and select Products and Solutions and Mobile Solutions and ACT for Palm. $99 and worth it.
And Then There Were Four
There’s a lot of press lately about the four remaining BI vendors, IBM/Cognos, SAP/Business Objects, Oracle/Hyperion, and Microsoft. These four vendors claim about have the BI installations that exist. Let’s not forget some of the other leaders with loyal followings, Teradata, Informatica and Microstrategy. SPSS helps other vendors match SAS on analytics. For new applications using the in-memory technology QlikTech is showing dynamic growth rates. This could be the beginning for new technologies in the BI market.
ACT! 2008 webinar training scheduled for June 6th
July 18th is the date for the next ACT! 2008 webinar. 3 hours from 9 AM PST to 12 PM. Cost is $199. Register via this link:
http://howtosoftware.shopol.com/Item/80_ACT2008.htm
Trends In Business Intelligence
Vendor consolidations have hit the BI world hard in the last year. This may mean the end of BI as a separate application. Hyperion Interactive Reporting and the remaining Hyperion suite of tools have been purchased by Oracle. Hyperion training will now be provided by Oracle. With the latest version of Hyperion you will see Oracle in the logo. Hosted BI is now knows as on demand business intelligence. Open source BI makes it easy to embed BI into other applications. What is BI really about? It is about information of all kinds and processes. The end result, we hope, is better business decision making.
Adding A template to the Write Menu
ACT! 2008 makes it easy to access and send a template to a single contact or multiple contacts. So, it would be convenient to be able to open the Write menu and click the template without have to search for it. After you create the template follow these steps:
- Open the Tools menu and select Customize
- Select Menus and Toolbars and the the tab Custom Commands
- Click New.
- Enter a command name like Thank you letter
- Tooltip text is not needed.
- Click the Command Line field and then Browse
- This is where it gets tricky! Change the Files of Type setting to All files and you have to navigate to the folder where your ACT! database is located (usually My Documents\ACT\Act for Windows \databases\databasename\templates) and then locate the template you want to add.
- Select and Click open. The path should appear in the Command Line field-truncated
- Click the Commands Tab and click on Custom Commands
- You new Command should be there, so click on it and -trickier still-drag it onto the the Write menu name. If you do this correctly, the menu opens and can drop the new command onto the menu.
- Click Close.
- Open the Write menu, and click the new command. Viola” It should open the word processor and merge the contact with the template.
ACT! 6.0 and Word 2003
If you want to connect this version of ACT with Word 2003, you need to install a hotfix file. The file attached allows you to do that-you have to rename it to EXE before it will run. Close ACT and Word-you might have to go to the Task Manager to kill Word. Rename to EXE and then double click the file. ACT will then connect to Word