Solutions Road Trip - The Presentations

After Al Marciante's talk, we all moved from the Diamond Club (a really nice large room overlooking the ballpark that holds a few hundred people) to our offices in Centerfield. We just added 2,000 new square feet of office space to the ~3,000 sq. ft. that we already had. Since they haven't had a chance to begin construction on the 2,000 feet yet, it's basically one big empty space perfect for having meetings with large groups of people.

There were three tracks of presentations with 3 presentations per track. We had given some of them before in our free weekly webcasts, but most people hadn't heard them before. All the sessions were delivered by interRel people so that we could guarantee the quality level of the presentations (and accept all the blame if they sucked eggs). The feedback we got was stellar, though I'm considering having client companies do some of the higher-level, best practice discussions next time so that more people can experience the thrill of public speaking.

• Hacking Hyperion: Undocumented and Unsupported. This track was for covering all the information that is normally not discussed and if it is documented, it's buried pretty darned deeply.
  1. Hacking Essbase. I delivered this presentation. I got to cover all kinds of things I've been keeping to myself over the years. I started off by showing the audience just how week the native Essbase password authentication was. People were shocked and I was amused. Someone asked if my they could have copies of my slides and I said, "Hell no." If there's anything I know, it's how to minimize my chances of being sued.
  2. Hacking Web Analysis
  3. Hacking Hyperion Planning. Tracy McMullen (best Essbase book co-author ever) gave this presentation (one of three she delivered today in addition to Hacking Web Analysis and Tuning Hyperion Planning) and from what I'm told, it was excellent. She covered, among other things, how to modify the JSP (Java Server Page) code for the web forms and how to make sense of the table layouts in the Planning repository. Tracy is also delivering a few presentations at Kaleidoscope, and if that's not motivation to go to New Orleans, nothing is.
• Tuning & Optimization for Mere Mortals. This track was for everyone interested in improving performance of their Hyperion applications.
  1. Hyperion Planning
  2. Essbase. I gave this presentation too and while it seemed to go well, I really think it should be split into multiple hours. There's just too many Essbase tuning tips to cover in an hour. This is why we're devoting all-day Wednesday at the Kaleidoscope conference in June to optimizing Essbase.
  3. OBIEE+. I also presented this session. It was supposed to be about tuning Web Analysis, Financial Reporting, and Interactive Reporting. The only problem was that most people aren't aware that OBIEE+ now includes these products. As such, it was my least attended presentation by far. The other sessions had 60+ attendees each, but this one had about 15. Since it was my last presentation of the day, though, I really enjoyed the break.
• Best Practices. This was mostly for the non-technical people in the crowd.
  1. System 9 Installation and Configuration
  2. Financial Reporting and Consolidation
  3. Essbase Design