(Updated August 2018 following SAP’s price rise) We don’t normally publish prices on this website. It’s not that we have something to hide, it’s just the complexity of SAP’s price list. There are two different distribution methods, each with its own price list. Each of these is potentially updated every month. That’s about 500 updates by the time… Read More »
Like most people, when I heard that SAP Anywhere was being ‘sunset’ in March, my first though was ‘What’s SAP Anywhere?’. Yes, I thought it was something to do with Sybase SQL Anywhere, but it turned out to be the world’s most obscure cloud accounts package. Next, there was the announcement that SAP Dashboard (aka Crystal Dashboard, aka… Read More »
I’ve been working with Metabase for nearly a year now. Pleased to say that this is the biggest upgrade yet. There’s been a lot of work on security which means that Metabase is now suitable for larger organisations with more complex security requirements. There are more new features than I have time to write about, so to save… Read More »
After 7 months of working with Metabase Dashboards at customer sites, I though it was about time I started talking about it! Our product page is here, the product showcase will be along once time permits. With the demise of Crystal Dashboard (Xcelsius), I spent some time looking at alternative products. The obvious first choice was to stick… Read More »
It started of simply enough – a Flash front-end for Excel. The clever bit was the interaction between the spreadsheet and the widgets. Great for budgeting and what-if analysis. Then some server-side stuff was added, so the licensing became complicated. It seemed to change slightly with every release. Sometimes it appeared that only the name had changed. The… Read More »
UPDATE This has now been fixed: SP4 from patch 000009 onwards SP5 from patch 000400 onwards SP6 For Crystal Server Users, you’ll need to go to SP6. For SAP BI, install the patches or SP6. It looks like there’s a definite problem.I’ve had an odd reply from SAP that talks about moving files from DEV to TEST to… Read More »
UPDATE This has now been fixed: SP4 from patch 000009 onwards SP5 from patch 000400 onwards SP6 For Crystal Server Users, you’ll need to go to SP6. For SAP BI, install the patches or SP6. First, if you’re just doing a fresh install with no old content to migrate then go ahead. 4.2 SP5 is perfectly stable.… Read More »
21 years ago, I was still working in the wine trade. At the time, the vast majority of wine was sealed with a traditional cork. Wines at the cheaper end of the market would often use agglomerate corks (bits of cork glued together). Some wines were starting to use artificial corks, but they were often difficult to open,… Read More »
Unless you’ve been on an extended Christmas break with no TV or Internet, you’ll have heard of Intel’s recent troubles. While it’s true that most computers will not be noticeably affected, servers that read and write large amounts of data to disk will be impacted. In my world, that affects two things – databases and reports. Large queries… Read More »
This is the first in a series of posts about licence compliance. It’s always difficult to get independent advice on licensing, so I’m attempting to highlight some potential pitfalls. Given the complexities and potential liabilities, you should always refer to your own licences. I’ve been trying to source some useful guidelines from SAP without success. First of all,… Read More »
Hint: It involves HTML5! I first used Crystal Dashboard (then known as Xcelsius) in 2004 or 2005. Back then, the fact that the dashboards were deployed as Flash files was a selling point. Flash was available on over 90% of clients and Adobe had great plans for further developing the platform. Then, it all changed. The iPad ignored… Read More »