Cel mai deschis blog despre afaceri și tehnologie

I recently read an interesting interview about mobile business intelligence, BI trends and cloud computing with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy. The interview was made by Jason Stamper from Computer Business Review, who is now widely regarded throughout Europe as „The Economist” of the IT industry.

I've noticed that in my experience, most users log into a single project. Either because there's only one project in the environment, or because the projects are specific to their department or function and it's the only one they have access to. With that, it's always slightly annoyed me that a user has to login and then click to access the single project they have.

Freeform SQL Reports can be a handy tool in your MicroStrategy bag of tricks. We're all tempted to turn to them from time to time, but when is the right time and what kinds of tricks can we manage by leveraging them? As always, the answer to the first question is going to be a personal preference and depend greatly on your project scenarios. Today I'll offer my opinions, as well as highlight some of the tricks you can do with Freeform SQL Reports.

One of the most important features to control in tuning your MicroStrategy environment is controlling Job Prioritization in the Intelligence Server. In the event that you have more concurrent jobs running than open slots on the database, queuing will occur. When a Job is in the Waiting status, that could be giving a very poor user experience. Fortunately, you do have some control to tell MicroStrategy which Jobs are more important than others. Today, I'll talk about how the Job Prioritization works, what options you have, and the Job Prioritization strategy that I use in my environments.

Job Prioritization occurs at the Database Instance and is a Governing setting for sending queries to the database. While there are Governing settings for the Intelligence Server to control concurrent jobs, those are system wide settings and are generally set very high (~100). The reason is that the Intelligence Server doesn't really have to do a lot of processing per job, at least compared to the amount the database has to do to retrieve the data.

Prioritization works by managing three slots: High, Medium and Low. By default, a job has Low priority. Jobs include not only Reports but also Prompt requests, and each Report on a Document counts as a separate job.

You can classify the priority of any given job in a number of ways, but the most direct is to setup the classification rules in the Job Prioritization Wizard. This can be found by opening the Database Instance for your Warehouse (Desktop -> Administration -> Configuration Objects -> Database Instances) and selecting the Job Prioritization tab, then clicking New. The wizard allows you to set global rules based on the type of job, the project it belongs to or the user requesting it.

by Bryan Brandow

(This article was first published on Bryan`s MicroStrategy Blog)

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.