Dunn Solutions Group

White Papers / Presentations

As leaders in a variety of industries, we at Dunn Solutions Group are often invited to present at conferences, user groups, and other industry events. Here you can download copies of white papers, presentations, and other materials that we develop.

Rx for Healthcare Budgeting: Gain Control and Efficiency with SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning

Does your healthcare organization live with a budgeting process that utilizes Excel spreadsheets and takes months to complete? Download this recorded webinar to review the challenges of using Excel for complex budgeting, and to learn how SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning can increase your budgeting efficiency, improve collaboration and give you greater control over the process. Plus, you will get a close-up look at Edge Planning – and see its exceptional power, flexibility and usability.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

High-Performance E-Commerce: Trends, Tools + Tactics for 2010

If your e-commerce capabilities and strategy are the same as two years ago (or even one year ago), it's time to update and upgrade. Now is the time to add new features, revamp your e-tailing architecture, improve the user experience and, most important, make tactical changes that will increase sales. But where to start? Get the roadmap you need when you download this recorded webinar.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

It's Called Business Intelligence for a Reason

Recorded and released in November 2009, this 20-minute podcast was produced by Enterprise Technology Management magazine (ETM), a global monthly report for CIOs and IT executives.  In it, Dunn Solutions Group President Bill Dunn offers his take on smart business intelligence strategy, and discusses the idea that BI is about more than just technology – it’s a business strategy.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Maximizing the Value of Economic Stimulus Funds

Focused on the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), this SAP Executive Insight document examines some of the major challenges and requirements that governmental agencies face with respect to the stimulus plan.  Going further, it describes how governments can transform their organization to devote more resources to achieving program goals and less on administrative overhead.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Empowering Users with Critical Business Information

Discover the benefits of using SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence software for self-service access to data, reporting, and information analysis. Learn how its powerful features will help you find, format, and analyze the critical information you need for making better decisions in less time.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

Get an overview of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, software that brings together the simplicity and speed of search capabilities with the trust and analytical power of business intelligence, giving you immediate answers to your business questions.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services

How can you best support data quality within data integration and migration projects? Find out how SAP BusinessObjects Data Services combines data quality and integration to help you move, transform, and improve any type of data in one development, runtime, management, security, and data connectivity environment.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Efficient Business Planning and Consolidation

Learn how CFOs are increasingly acting as strategic advisor to the business – and doing a better job of it with accurate financial data, integrated planning tools, and predictive analysis. SAP software helps boost overall corporate performance with integrated planning and consolidation applications that empower users.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation

Discover the benefits of using SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation to streamline planning and reduce business risks. Designed for midsize companies, this application provides an integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation solution that is user focused and process centric.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Discover the Power of Interactive Dashboards

What if you could easily view up-to-the-minute, critical business information and analyze multiple business scenarios? What if you could readily present interactive dashboards and analytics within PowerPoint slides, Adobe PDF documents and over the Web? What if you could share dashboards and analytics across the enterprise in a scalable, secure environment? Empower yourself: Download this presentation (by Jose Hernandez, Director of Business Intelligence) to see BusinessObjects interactive dashboards for mid- and enterprise-size organizations.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Real BI in SharePoint 2007 Using BOBJ XI 3.0

Sharepoint has become a predominant portal solution for mid-sized companies, allowing orgainzations to collaborate and share critical information via a browser.  But is a portal complete without an enterprise-ready business intelligence platform to provide one version of the truth?  This presentation (by Jose Hernandez, Director of Business Intelligence) shows how to deliver BI via SharePoint using the BOBJ XI 3.0 platform.  Viewers not only see a working integration, but also how it was done “under the covers.”  Topics included: report delivery, Xcelsius dashboards, ad hoc reporting, authentication and single sign-on.  Additional documents provide important related information.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Integrating SAP BW With Business Objects 3.0

Business Objects XI 3.0 offers many new features and many improvements over previous versions. One of the most exciting features is improved integration with SAP BW. This presentation (by Eric Spaulding, Business Intelligence Consultant) discusses the various ways to get to SAP data, and shows how to set up and use the SAP Integration Kit to manage and use universes against SAP BW. The demonstration includes: creating SAP BW universes, managing SAP BW universes, and support for BW metadata.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

The Need for Objective Measurements in Software Development Projects

Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

The Growing Complexity of J2EE Applications

Project Leaders that are serious about performance know that they have to address it at every step of the application life cycle. But that can be a tall order when the many disparate tools each only address a small piece of the problem.

Borland's integrated suite of performance tools let you manage application performance during development, analyze it in pre-deployment and solve performance problems in production giving you complete control.

FEATURED SOLUTIONS:
Borland JBuilder ®
Borland Optimizeit ™ ServerTrace
Borland ® Enterprise Server
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

How to Write Effective Use Cases

"How do I find good requirements?" is the question software analysts frequently ask when analyzing a problem. Ivar Jacobson pioneered Use Cases as a tool for capturing and modeling functional requirements from the user's perspective. Use Cases organize requirements into stories or cases that describe how a user actually uses the system. The Use Case approach provides more context than traditional approaches for describing requirements and therefore makes it easier for both the analyst and the client to understand the system's requirements.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Integrating J2EE and .NET using web services

Microsoft and Java platforms have become de facto choices for new e-Business initiatives. Here, we examine when, how, and why to select and optimally leverage them for strategic initiatives.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Success Starts with Requirements Management

Getting a handle on your project requirements is an important first step to delivering an application or system that satisfies your customers and business needs. In an easy-to-follow workflow, this seminar walks you through the important concepts and offers tips and techniques for more effective requirements management. This includes sections on problem understanding, modeling your business processes or system, eliciting requirements, use cases, managing project scope, and the gathering and prioritization of enhancement requests.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

XML for the Fearless

Extensible Markup Language, or XML, is responsible for a quiet revolution in data formats and is rapidly transforming network landscapes everywhere. These landscapes are quickly becoming a jungle of intertwined technologies and newly-sprouted grammars that can strike fear into the hearts of engineers everywhere. Fear not! Accompany an XML Adventurer on a bold journey to the heart of the XML jungle, and get a close-up view of some of its more powerful and amazing new creatures.

Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Using XML for Inter-object Communication

Legacy systems are valuable: they hold most of the world's data, including corporate data, yellow pages, bank account information and virtually all legal documents. But IT and business professionals also view legacy systems as the systems that can't be changed, that are holding huge amounts of data hostage and that can't interact with new systems or new media devices, such as the Web. Now, new technologies based on XML and Java can change that pessimistic outlook.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Performance Management and Business Objects Performance Management Tools

Beginning with the business case for performance management (PM), and ending with a discussion of the advanced PM tools offered by Business Objects, this presentation gives you the information you need to drive PM initiatives in your organization.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

BusinessObjects Migration: The Path to XI Release 2 – NEW! (August 2005)

In previous versions of this whitepaper, we discussed the various paths you could take to get to the fully unified Crystal/BusinessObjects platform. This unified platform is known as “XI R2.” The beta version was released in July, and November 15, 2005, has been set as the date for general availability. It now is time to think about taking that next step on your migration path. This new whitepaper (August 2005) updates our advice, and reflects signficant changes to the BOBJ product roadmap.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Deliver Real-time Dashboards with Data Integrator

Data Integrator (DI), Business Objects’ powerful ETL tool, traditionally is used to manipulate large volumes of data in batch mode. But DI’s real-time services and built-in transformation objects can be used to join real-time data with other sources (XML, text files, ERP systems, a variety of databases), process it immediately, and update data marts and reports as changes occur. The result is real-time BI. This presentation, given at the 2005 Business Objects International User Conference, tells you more about this under-utilized capability.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Hierarchical Trees and Business Objects

Many businesses define dimensions using hierarchies or trees, it is often challenging to create universe objects against the trees in such a way that a user has access to the complete tree using a single prompt. The methods presented in this session will include the basic layout of the source table used to achieve the desired functionality. In addition the LOV object will be defined and clearly illustrated and finally the objects and conditions used in conjunction will be created. Finally, we will demonstrate the reporting piece where a user can take advantage of the objects and create a report capable of drilling through a hierarchical view of a tree with dynamic column headers.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Best Practices for Deployment Environments

Do you need to manage reports and universes between separate development, quality assurance, and production environments? Do you have to define deployment best practices or adhere to Sarbanes-Oxley provisions? In this session, you'll learn how to facilitate report and universe promotion between environments and lessen the amount of time spent on this activity. See how the Import Wizard and BIAR files can ease the migration of universes, documents, and/or users between various environments--without compromising control and security. This must-attend session will include a demonstration of how to use the Import Wizard and BIAR files, and you'll learn the pros and cons for both methods.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Accelerating J2EE Development Using Patterns

This seminar begins with a discussion of the state of enterprise computing and outlines how the major J2EE technologies address these needs. A review of the J2EE architecture and a discussion of how to design a robust application with the J2EE patterns are then combined with a demonstration of a real-world solution built using the J2EE  specification. The remainder of the course describes a set of best practices in applying J2EE technologies at several tiers such as the Client tier, the Web tier, the EJB tier and the EIS tier.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

HIPPA Concerns - Implementing Tight Data Security

HIPAA regulations mandate that only authorized users can view medical data. This session focuses on how to implement data security for your data warehouse such that data security is seamlessly integrated into your ad hoc reporting environment. A well-implemented data security model addresses three goals: (1) security is enforced for ad hoc reporting, as well as shared corporate and private documents, (2) security has a minimal impact on query performance, and (3) the security model is easy to maintain as your user requirements change. Learn how to plan for data security when designing your data model, your universe, and enterprise security in order to achieve these three goals
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

20 Secret Shortcuts and Workarounds for Crystal Reports Designers and Developers

Learn to power through tricky design and development tasks—and create reports that will amaze your boss and co-workers. These secret tips and tricks are based on the questions most frequently asked of Crystal Reports experts. And now these secrets can be yours—for free!

Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

Managing Change Before Change Manages You

This is normal, frequent, and good! The only systems for which requirements will not change are those that have no users, no customers, and no stakeholders. During this session, learn three tricks to help you cope with requirements change.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.

The EPM Infrastucture Revealed

Dashboards and performance management, which together comprise enterprise performance management (EPM), are just the tip of the business intelligence iceberg. There’s so much more under the surface. In fact, the most important factor in a successful EPM deployment is having a sound BI infrastructure. This presentation, given at the 2005 Business Objects International User Conference, offers an inside look at EPM and all the critical layers beneath. It provides a number of valuable tips for implementing EPM, and offers best practices for the infrastructure that supports it, including universes, data marts, data warehouses and data integration.
Click here to have this document e-mailed to you.