Cel mai deschis blog despre afaceri și tehnologie

As I read on an article by Michelle Symonds (project manager trainer at ProjectSmart in UK), many complex, long-term projects fail to live up to their promises and produce disappointing outcomes on completion. First of all for exceeding their budgets or deadlines or both. „Project managers often have a poor reputation for delivering what was expected without budget or time over-runs. And one of the industries with the worst record is the technology industry where failures are said to exceed 50% of all projects undertaken”, said Symonds.
As she said, „organisations make commitments to major projects, but cannot always deliver what was expected and, more worryingly, cannot determine how much value they are getting from their investment”.

I've met a lot of people that have been confused about Administrative privileges in MicroStrategy and how they relate to their licensing costs. The confusion possibly is related to an old bundle MicroStrategy used to sell called "Administrator" which included the products Object Manager, Enterprise Manager and Command Manager. While those tools are critical to administer a system, they aren't related to actual Administrative privileges like killing jobs, creating schedules, clearing caches or reloading projects. The truth is that administrative privileges don't require any license beyond a Desktop license and in fact are very granular. You can grant any user access to manage anything in MicroStrategy from full on administrative functions to simple things like clearing the cache.

The healthcare industry in most countries is dealing with low revenues as well as a great lack of organization. Even in the healthcare public sector, they try to increase revenues as it allows them to buy better equipment, increase capacity and thus, obtain more income from the state.
Even If, in most of the cases it is hard to make managers, from hospitals and laboratories, understand that a Business Intelligence solution would help them lower their costs, increase revenues and help organize their structure, it is noticeable they are changing their minds and try to accept the idea that a BI solution would not be a waste of money, but a great help on their daily operations.
How many times do they underuse a ward due to a bad schedule? It is not rare to see a doctor coming into an operating theatre with a patient and find out that operating theater is already taken. It is also not rare that a patient in recovery needs to be moved from one room to another because of schedule overlapping.
A Business Intelligence solution would easily help managers:

One of the eagerly anticipated features added to 9.2 was the addition of an out of the box Google Map Widget. Well, not technically out of the box, but at least a provided plugin with easy to follow instructions for setting it up. While the steps seem straight forward, I often see a lot of questions surrounding it. There`s also a surprise waiting for you if you're currently enjoying the plugin in 9.2 and haven't yet upgraded to 9.2.1.

MicroStrategy 9.0.2 included a new Web mode called Express to Documents. In the same release, MicroStrategy removed the antiquated View mode from Web, which was a static view of your Document. Considering the push for interactivity, this was an inevitable evolution of the product. In reality, if you don't build any interactive components, then Interactive and View mode were effectively the same thing.

MicroStrategy offers a lot of built in manipulations that can be performed directly within the URL. This can provide a lot of benefits for seamlessly linking to MicroStrategy reports from either within MicroStrategy itself or from an external system.
The URL API may sound complicated, but its actually really simple and doesn't require any actual programming or extra licenses. This makes it the ideal tool to perform some neat tricks and even some basic "free" customizations.
Before you can start modifying the URL for a report or document, you must first obtain it. DO NOT ever take the URL out of your address bar. This usually contains extra information that's specific to your current session, or it's missing crucial information that is already stored in your session.
Once you've got the base URL, you can start adding/modifying it. The most common task to perform is to automatically answer Prompts. This is useful when linking to reports or documents from an existing report or document and you want to automatically answer some or all of the prompts based on previous knowledge, either because you know what the user clicked on or you know what the user previously answered.
There are 5 built in methods for answering prompts:

MicroStrategy Cloud (MSC) is the first cloud service purpose-built for the world's largest data volumes, high concurrency and high performance. MicroStrategy Cloud scales dynamically in response to demand, from tens of users to tens of thousands. MSC is also configured, optimized and maintained by MicroStrategy, so organizations no longer have to worry about provisioning hardware, tuning the architecture, or upgrading software.

MicroStrategy Cloud customers can connect directly to their on-premises or cloud-based data sources via MicroStrategy’s multisource capabilities. In addition, customers can opt to build and host their own database on the MicroStrategy Cloud through integrated database and ETL (extract, transform, and load) options.

Compared to traditional on-premises BI approaches, MicroStrategy Cloud is quicker to deploy and more flexible, delivers world-class performance, and offers significant financial advantages. MicroStrategy Cloud eliminates inefficient and risky processes related to planning, architecting, sourcing, contracting, budgeting, hiring, training, installing, testing, deploying, and more. And it is designed to deliver the highest available levels of security and operational control.

Recently, I took part in a very interesting discussion on Linkedin about open source vs. closed source BI tools. It wasn't a general discussion on closed vs. open source. It was a discussion about Frankenstein BI (as closed source followers called the open source BI tools) and Big Businesses BI (term used by open source advocates to define closed source BI).

MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook, one of the most recent enterprise product launched by MicroStrategy, is a new cloud-based service that interconnects enterprise IT environments and enterprise applications with the Facebook social graph. MicroStrategy Gateway converts the Facebook social graph data structure into a relational data structure, making it instantly suitable for enterprise applications like CRM, marketing, service, sales, loyalty, and mobile applications. By enabling bidirectional data flow, MicroStrategy Gateway lets you add social intelligence from Facebook to enterprise applications, and enterprise applications can interact back with the social network.
MicroStrategy Gateway enables companies to inject social intelligence into their enterprise applications transforming them into "friendly" applications that simplify and enhance the consumer experience. MicroStrategy Gateway is continuously updated to ensure compliance with Facebook's privacy policy and will use only the data permitted, users being in full control of how their Facebook information is accessed.
With MicroStrategy Gateway, a wide range of developers and technologies are now building social intelligence, personalization, and social interactivity into their applications. Even custom-built Facebook applications can use MicroStrategy Gateway as a simpler and more efficient access mechanism, particularly when the queries require a real-time response.

You can sign up for a Webcast on August 24th for more information about MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook.