XI Feature Spotlight: Calendars

An incredibly useful feature in Business Objects XI is the Calendar object.

In the past, it has been quite difficult to schedule reports on very specific dates, e.g second and last Wednesday of the month, or excluding Bank Holidays, etc. To get around this is in the past, we either had to create some custom code or refresh the report daily and have an automated job delete the reports we don’t want. Very messy.

XI now provides us with calendars. Calendars are customized lists of dates that are created in the CMC. With this feature, we can create a custom calendar object which we can associate with a report when we schedule. Scheduling a report to refresh on the last Wednesday of every month, or excluding all Bank Holidays, is now a breeze and takes minutes instead of hours.

Business Objects books

A few people have asked if I can recommend a good Business Objects XI book.

Unlike many other applications, there seems to be a distinct lack of third party reading material for Business Objects products. This isn’t specific to XI, but has been the case for all previous versions. Not sure why this is.

While it is true that Business Objects provide comprehensive support guides in PDF format, it is handy to have a book on your desk to look things up as and when required.

It depends on what you are after really. If you are using XI, you can’t really go wrong with the following book: BusinessObjects XI (Release 2): The Complete Reference: Release 2 (Complete Reference). If you need a book which deals with pre-XI releases, consider Cindi’s Business Objects: The Complete Reference (Osborne Complete Reference).

Both books are written by Cindi Howson. Cindi runs her own company specialisign in the BI arena and has written a number of articles.

If you are an XI administrator, you might expect more detail in the CMC area, as this is a radical departure from the pre-XI way of setting up and administering Business Objects.

It is also worth noting that there is no accompanying CD with the XI book. So if you want to read it on the train, you are going to have to lug it around.

Having said that, the best source of Business Objects information simply has to the Business Objects Forum – BOB. Quite simply, this is the definitive destination for answers to your Business Objects problems.

Business Objects XI 3.0 Product Launch event

Business Objects has announced it’s XI 3.0 product launch events.

It’s London event is on 12th March 2008.

Registration link here.