Look Smarter Than You Are: Webcasts

Showing posts with label Webcasts. Show all posts

November 27, 2015

Learn About Hyperion & Oracle BI... 5 Minutes at a Time

Since early 2015, we've been trying to figure out how to help educate more people around the world on Oracle BI and Oracle EPM. Back in 2006, interRel launched a webcast series that started out once every two weeks and then rapidly progressed to 2-3 times per week. We presented over 125 webcasts last year to 5,000+ people from our customers, prospective customers, Oracle employees, and our competitors.

In 2007, we launched our first book and in the last 8 years, we've released over 10 books on Essbase, Planning, Smart View, Essbase Studio, and more. (We even wrote a few books we didn't get to publish on Financial Reporting and the dearly departed Web Analysis.) In 2009, we started doing free day-long, multi-track conferences across North America and participating in OTN tours around the world. We've also been trying to speak at as many user groups and conferences as we can possibly fit in. Side note, if you haven't signed up for Kscope16 yet, it's the greatest conference ever: go to kscope16.com and register (make sure you use code IRC at registration to take $100 off each person's costs).

We've been trying to innovate our education offerings since then to make sure there were as many happy Hyperion, OBIEE, and Essbase customers around the world as possible. Since we started webcasts, books, and free training days, others have started doing them too which is awesome in that it shares the Oracle Business Analytics message with even more people.

The problem is that the time we have for learning and the way we learn has changed. We can no longer take the time to sit and read an entire book. We can't schedule an hour a week at a specific time to watch an hour webcast when we might only be interested in a few minutes of the content. We can't always take days out of our lives to attend conferences no matter how good they are. So in June 2015 at Kscope16, we launched the next evolution in training (epm.bi/videos):

#PlayItForward is our attempt to make it easier for people to learn by making it into a series of free videos. Each one focuses on a single topic. Here's one I did that attempts to explain What Is Big Data? in under 12 minutes:

As you can see from the video, the goal is to teach you a specific topic with marketing kept to an absolute minimum (notice that there's not a single slide in there explaining what interRel is). We figure if we remove the marketing, people will not only be more likely to watch the videos but share them as well (competitors: please feel free to watch, learn, and share too). We wanted to get to the point and not teach multiple things in each video.

Various people from interRel have recorded videos in several different categories including What's New (new features in the new versions of various products), What Is? (introductions to various products), Tips & Tricks, deep-dive series (topics that take a few videos to cover completely), random things we think are interesting, and my personal pet project, the Essbase Technical Reference.

Essbase Technical Reference on Video

Yes, I'm trying to convert the Essbase Technical Reference into current, easy-to-use videos. This is a labor of love (there are hundreds of videos to be made on just Essbase calc functions alone) and I needed to start somewhere. For the most part, I'm focusing on Essbase Calc Script functions and commands first, because that's where I get the most questions (and where some of the examples in the TechRef are especially horrendous). I've done a few Essbase.CFG settings that are relevant to calculations and a few others I just find interesting. I'm not the only one at interRel doing them, because if we waited for me to finish, well, we'd never finish. The good news is that there are lots of people at interRel who learned things and want to pass them on.

I started by doing the big ones (like CALC DIM and AGG) but then decided to tackle a specific function category: the @IS... boolean functions. I have one more of those to go and then I'm not sure what I'm tackling next. For the full ever-increasing list, go to http://bit.ly/EssTechRef, but here's the list as of this posting:

What's Next

To see all the videos we have at the moment, go to epm.bi/videos. I'm looking for advice on which TechRef videos I should record next. I'm trying to do a lot more calculation functions and Essbase.CFG settings before I move on to things like MDX functions and MaxL commands, but others may take up that mantle. If you have functions you'd like to see a video on, shoot an email over to epm.bi/videos, click on the discussion tab, and make a suggestion or two. If you like the videos and find them helpful (or you have suggestions on how to make them more helpful), please feel free to comment too.

I think I'm going to go start working on my video on FIXPARALLEL.

October 30, 2013

Competitors, Welcome to Our Webcasts

I was happy to be a part of Oracle's EPM Showcase yesterday in New York City. It was a half-day event (plus a happy hour) that had Oracle giving a keynote followed by two 90-minute breakout session timeslots (with two sessions happening concurrently). I was speaking during the first timeslot on Hyperion DRM (Data Relationship Management) along with Nikki from Verizon and Erin Lineberry from interRel. In my talk, I described how companies need a single system of record for hierarchies and explained how DRM was a really good fit particularly with the new data governance module in 11.1.2.3.

There were partners in my session, and I had no problem at all with it. After all, this was a conference open to anyone and I am a firm believer that when people learn more, the whole community benefits. This is what motivates me to write all of my books, cause believe me, it's not for the money (Google "Starving Authors" before you ever think to make money writing). I also speak at way too many events around the world each year from tiny user groups to massive conferences like Kscope, Collaborate, and OpenWorld with no concerns that my sessions are primarily filled with Oracle partners looking to improve.

After my session was over, there was one more timeslot for the day and since I didn't want to sit in the hall for 90 minutes, I went to Huron Consulting Group's (they're the company that bought Blue Stone) session on the future of Planning. It sounded more interesting than Hackett's session which was my other possibility and I saw that one of the speakers was Mike Nader who is a great presenter. If nothing else, I would get to hear Mike's engaging take on the world since he joined Blue Stone. I sat in the room in the back row (there were plenty of extra seats, but I wanted to leave the good seats for potential customers).

Right as the session was about to start, Rick Schmitt from Huron (Blue Stone) came over to me and asked me to leave. I was curious why since I was an official attendee at the event and he said that they were going to be talking over "some proprietary stuff." I assumed he meant his slides at the beginning on the Blue Stone acquisition or "why Blue Stone is the best at XYZ," so I offered to leave for the first few slides. I don't need nor want competitive info and I certainly didn't want to make him nervous during his sales pitch. He said that no, they were going to share lots of proprietary info throughout the session and he didn't want competitors in the room during their session at all.

Rather embarrassed but more bemused, I smiled, gathered my things, and walked out of the room. I sat in the hall for a while wondering what cool things I was missing and feeling jealous of the 50 clients that got to hear from Blue Stone. (There's nothing like being excluded from something to make you want it more.) As I sat there, I pondered my own stance on information sharing. Personally, I believe that if the community as a whole gets better - if the community learns more - the quality of Hyperion implementations will rise. Satisfaction with Oracle EPM will rise, and as the reputation of Hyperion gets better, the Hyperion market will grow which benefits the entire community: customers, Oracle, and partners.

And it made me ask what I could be doing better.

So starting effective immediately, all of the public webcasts interRel does (and we did over 100 webcasts last year) will be open to everyone. That's right: competitors, please come join our webcasts and we'll share all the information that we spend months putting together with you. You've always had access to our books, our sessions at user groups, our presentations at conferences, and now you have access to our webcasts too. I hope that this starts a trend: I strongly encourage our competition to open up their sessions and webcasts to anyone who wants to attend. Don't be afraid: if you're good at what you do, you shouldn't be afraid to help the competition get better too. Information is meant to be free and to point out the obvious, if the Hyperion market gets bigger from happier clients telling everyone they know to buy Hyperion, your potential customer base gets bigger too.

Our next webcast is Thursday, October 31. It's on how Smart View is finally an awesome replacement for the Essbase Excel Add-In and I hope to see a ton of our competition on the webcast. Visit http://bit.ly/iRWebcasts to register.

June 4, 2013

Webcast Series - What's New in EPM 11.1.2.3 and OBIEE 11.1.1.7

Today I'm giving the first presentation in a 9-week long series on all the new things in Oracle EPM Hyperion 11.1.2.3 and OBIEE 11.1.1.7. The session today (and again on Thursday) is an overview of everything new in all the products. It's 108 slides which goes to show you that there's a lot new in 11.1.2.3. I won't make it through all 108 slides but I will cover the highlights.

I'm actually doing 4 of the 9 weeks (and maybe 5, if I can swing it). Here's the complete lineup in case you're interested in joining:

June 4 & 6 - Overview
June 11 & 13 - HFM
June 18 & 20 - Financial Close Suite
July 9 & 11 - Essbase and OBIEE
July 16 & 18 - Planning
July 23 & 25 - Smart View and Financial Reporting
July 30 & Aug 1 - Data & Metadata Tools (FDM, DRM, etc.)
Aug 6 & 8 - Free Supporting Tools (LCM, Calc Mgr, etc.)
Aug 13 & 15 - Documentation

If you want to sign up, visit http://www.interrel.com/educations/webcasts. There's no charge and I don't do marketing during the sessions (seriously, I generally forget to explain what company I work for). It's a lot of information, but we do spread it out over 9 weeks, so it's not information overload.

And bonus: you get to hear my monotone muppet voice for an hour each week. #WorstBonusEver

February 24, 2009

Upcoming Webcast on the Hyperion User Conferences

One of the questions I get asked the most often is, "Now that the Hyperion Solutions conference is sadly no longer [pause for moment of quiet reflection] which conference should I be attending?" The answer is remarkably confusing since there is no longer one catch all conference. While I've been answering this question in person and on this blog for close to two years now, this is still a major point of confusion in the user, partner, and Oracle communities.

So on March 3 at 11AM Central and March 5 at 1PM Central, I'm going to be hosting brief (30-45 minute) presentations on all the major conferences and who should attend which ones. Normally, the weekly interRel webcasts are not open to our competitors, but for this one topic, we are opening it up to everyone. While I normally don't like training my competition, in this case, I figure the more people who know where to go, the better.

I'll be featuring the OpenWorld, Collaborate, and Kaleidoscope conferences, but I'll also be speaking briefly about the local HUGs (Hyperion User Groups) and their replacements at OAUG, IOUG, and ODTUG. I'll cover which type of users should go to which conferences (and user groups) and I'll give you an idea of the agendas for Hyperion/EPM attendees you're likely to see at each conference.

If you don't want to end up at the wrong conference in 2009 and beyond, try to carve out a few minutes to attend one of these talks I'll be doing. Feel free to send a link over to your friends (those people you're connected to on Facebook and LinkedIn) so they can attend too. Each webcast can handle up to 1,000 people, so the more, the merrier! Here's the link and I'll see you on March 3 or 5th:

http://www.interrel.com/upcomingwebcasts.aspx