We’ve been helping student accommodation providers report and analyse their Starrez data for over 5 years. The built-in reports are fine up to a point, but most users soon need a little more. Whether you’re using StarRez installed on your own servers, or in the cloud, the data is there waiting for you. It’s great […]
Technical
Staffplan Reports? Don’t know your tblActuals from your tblBookings?
Not forgetting tblRegularInfo! It’s said that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in something. We’ve spent 11 years working with the Staffplan database. In that time, we’ve written close to 600 reports, dozens of Dashboards and 100+ views and stored procedures. We’ve even integrated a 3rd party text message system to […]
Metabase 0.33 Released
More excitement as another update is released! The more observant will notice that I didn’t publish anything about 0.32. Reason being, it was boring. Lots of very worthwhile changes under the hood, but nothing new to look at. 0.33 is much more interesting. The biggest change is the all new query interface. You can now […]
3 Tips for running WordPress on Windows
After running this site using WordPress on Windows for 5 years or so, it’s about time I offered some tips for WordPress on Windows. 1. Don’t do it2. Don’t do it3. Don’t do it It’s called LAMP for a reason. L=Linux, A=Apache, M=MySQL, P=PHP. There’s no mention of ‘W’ for Windows or ‘I’ for Internet […]
Metabase 0.31 released
I’m like a child at Christmas when it comes to software updates. I can’t wait to try out all the new bits and push the new buttons. This enthusiasm has been dampened lately with Microsoft’s well documented problems and the glacial progress of SAP’s BI products. So it’s great to have a new release of […]
SAP Licence Compliance – prevention is better than cure!
This is my 2nd post on licensing. The plan is to highlight common errors that lead to problems with compliance. Hopefully, I won’t receive any passive-aggressive emails/telephone calls requesting edits this time! The current SAP Software Use Rights document is 76 pages long. The information below is to help you around the common mistakes. It’s […]
Lumira Discovery, SAP Dashboard, SAP Anywhere gone or going – what’s next?
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 […]
Metabase 0.30 released
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, […]
Metabase – easy, open source way to ask questions and learn from data.
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 […]
Farewell Xcelsius/BOB Dashboards/Crystal Dashboards
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 […]