Independent Data Consultancy
Good NewsNew release arriving in mid-March 2025. There’ll be another in 2027, then another in 2029 (may slip a bit TBC).This is all great news. 4.2 was supposed to be the last version, then we were told it would be 4.3. It looks like SAP’s cloud-only strategy hasn’t worked out quite so well as they’d […]
Another great release from Metabase. I’m just ashamed that I’ve not been writing enough about previous updates. I’ll go through the new stuff in 48 plus some of the other recent additions to this rapidly developing software. There’s a long list of bug fixes which surprised me as I rarely encounter any problems. Looking in […]
More and more Crystal Server users are now finding that their maintenance has expired even though they haven’t cancelled anything. That’s becoming more of a problem now that Crystal 2016 and earlier are no longer supported. Before we look at your options, why has this happened? First, a bit of history (a little simplified). Crystal […]
There’s more to reporting than just downloading spreadsheets to fiddle with. We’ve written the extracts to bring your CarePlanner data into PowerBI or any other data visualisation software. Here’s a small example: Yes, I know there are no numbers, there’s a good reason for that! Once designed, the PowerBI report can be securely published to […]
Your cloud migration completed successfully. Now you can access your application from anywhere without any concern about maintaining a server or installing client applications. Bliss!Then a colleague or customer requests some data in a specific format. You download a 100 column spreadsheet from the new cloud application, specifying the date range of the records you […]
Like most consultants, I’m using more and more open source software. A big change for me was to use PostgreSQL following 20 years experience of MS SQL Server. What follows is part comparison, part ‘things I wish I’d known before I started’.
Your carers and appointments are in CarePlanner. You want to use Wagestream to allow your carers to be paid sooner. What to do? Harder still, CarePlanner doesn’t calculate how much your carers are due until you run your timesheets. That’s just too late. Fortunately, we’ve done all the hard work. First, we drag the data […]
ECM gives huge gains in carer efficiency and client care by monitoring carers’ arrival and departure. Scheduling is enhanced. Lone care worker safety is greatly improved.However, it is greatly dependent upon high compliance rates. If a carer fails to check-in or check-out, the data quickly becomes less useful. It may be that the carer is […]
Over the last 3 years, I’ve started to do a lot more work using PowerBI. In terms of planning and designing, it’s similar to QlikView/QlikSense in that you first load and transform data, then do the pretty stuff. I’m now seeing more interest in migrating from Crystal Reports to PowerBI.At first, this made no sense […]
SAP BI 4.3/Crystal Server 2020 comes with the new Fiori launch pad. It’s the one that looks like this: The old 4.2 looks more like this: Admittedly, the new one is much more ‘modern’, but once you’ve got loads of users working from home right now and don’t have the time to retrain them for […]
