Customer Reviews

BusinessObjects XI Release 2 For Dummies

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

One of the main reasons I like the Dummies series is that it helps me to know what I don't know. When I have no background on the overall structure of a technology, I find that a Dummies book helps me to get the right mental framework so I can start to dive in at a more technical level. BusinessObjects XI Release 2 For Dummies by Derek Torres, Stuart Mudie, and Julie Albaret once again filled that role for me when it comes to working with BusinessObjects. At least now I can start to use the tool without floundering around so much.

Contents:
Introduction
Part 1 - Getting Started with BusinessObjects: Business Intelligence and BusinessObjects XI Release 2 - Working Hand in Hand; Deploying on a Single Computer; Performing a Server Installation; Taking Control with the Central Management Console
Part 2 - Universes: Creating a Universe from the Safety of Your Desk; Defining a Universe; Joining Your Universe; Adding Dimensions to Your Universe
Part 3 - Using Your Desktop for Reporting: Reporting Live from the Desktop; Building Queries; Documents in BusinessObjects
Part 4 - Making Web Intelligence Work for You: Getting Your Hands Dirty with InfoView; Setting Up Your Documents; Working with Your Completed Documents
Part 5 - Keeping Track of How Your Organization Is Doing: A Different Kind of Dashboard; Making Better Decisions through Analytics; Using Performance Manager to Set Goals and Track Achievement
Part 6 - Getting the Best Possible Data with Data Marts: Putting Data Integrator to Work for You; Working with Data Marts
Part 7 - The Part of Tens: Ten Ways to Prepare for BusinessObjects Integration; Ten Resources to Help You
Part 8 - Appendixes: Reporting on Crystal Reports; Glossary
Index

We use BusinessObjects where I work, and it's always been on my list of "one day I have to get around to investigating this tool" items. Now after reading this book, I'm bumping that up from a "one day" to a quarterly goal to hold myself accountable. The authors start out with the basics of "what is BusinessObjects", as well as how you install it. From there, they get into the basics of how to set up queries to data sources, formatting reports, some SQL terminology for getting the right relationships between data, and how to set up reports for use by others. I was especially intrigued by their chapter on Dashboards, as that's becoming an increasingly important tool for conveying summary information at a glance to knowledge workers.

I don't expect a Dummies book to serve as an ongoing, exhaustive reference for a particular software package. That's what the 800 page volumes are for. Business Objects XI Release 2 for Dummies gives me that quick start to get going quickly. Hopefully by the end of this year, this book will have helped lead me down the BusinessObjects path and opened a number of new opportunities for what I can offer my end users.

I've tried other Dummies books, and I wasn't pleased. I really thought this one would be different. I had a 2-hour intro to this software from the rep who installed for my company. I had never seen it before, and I haven't seen him (the rep) since. I thought the book would help me thru the transition, but it didn't. The terminology is there, but the practical examples are not. I was looking for something that would walk me thru a useful example from beginning to end (creation of universe to completed report(s). No such luck.

The authors enjoyed the play on 'universe' terms and jokes, but they didn't impart nearly enough wisdom to suit me, and certainly not enough to make this book useful to me.

I suppose it is my own fault for trying to get a book that didn't cost me an arm and a leg... just my sanity. If you really need to learn this software on your own, look elsewhere. This book won't help you.

After reading through page 270, save for the administration chapter, and then getting a look at Cindi Howson's "Business Objects XI -- The Complete Reference", I can tell you without any reservation whatsoever: save your time and money.

It is immediately and abundantly clear to me that Howson's book has much, much more of the information I, and probably you, really want. Read the bad reviews for that book, and know that this one is much worse.

As for this book:

Conceptually weak and sloppy; badly organized; barely edited.

Almost entirely a tour of the user interface with almost no depth---no ongoing examples, no case studies, and little sense of work-flow.

Favors scattered repetition over a more organized, in-depth conceptual framework, i.e. details of some features are spread throughout the text, often with repetition. If you want to know about a particular feature, there's no single place you can go to learn all the important things about it. Using the index, you'll have to wade through the repetition to get the all the info you need. But again, all you learn about is the UI, not anything about why, when, or whether.

And it's not even a high quality tour of the UI: Amazingly inefficient use of screenshots: repeating very simple images; failing to give complete detail in most others (e.g. labeling nothing at all or only a single button in a full toolbar image); referring to an icon by color when all the images are b&w; long sequences of steps with only a single UI image; needlessly truncated images ... and so on!

Bad humor, seriously misleading metaphors and analogies.

Bizarre use of subordinate clauses (e.g. Whether you know it or not, ...<feature>... is extremely important. Well, I guess I know it now...)

One example: makes a solid effort at disambiguating documents and reports, but then immediately uses the terms so utterly interchangeably as to foster much confusion, and lead me to conclude that the authors themselves must not be fully clear on the distinction in actual practice.

A savvy computer user would almost certainly better use their time just cruising through the user interface, spot checking the help files, with perhaps a short Q&A with another user every once in a while.

This is an excellent book to read to quickly get yourself up to speed in Business Objects. It's understandable and an easy read.