Cel mai deschis blog despre afaceri și tehnologie

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)

We continue to permanently improve our ERP solutions helping companies to achieve their long-term growth targets and to enhance productivity. Therefore, we just launched the 2.7 version of SocrateOpen, an open source ERP & CRM „tier 1” class solution.

This new version of SocrateOpen comes with more than 90 enhancements in Purchasing, CRM&services, Distribution, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Accounting, Open Items, Fixed Assets, Stocks, Projects and Production, certain features requiring a Professional or Enterprise Edition subscription. Installation of this version needs database migration.

The version is available for customers with an active support and maintenance subscription (and can be downloaded from the BITSoftware Webstore), as well as for the rest of the community (from the SocrateOpen Community website).

For more information about SocrateOpen please visit the product section.

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.

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.

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.

One of the main goals of Business Intelligence is to organize and distribute metrics on the performance of the business. But one of the trickiest things to measure is the performance of the BI platform itself. A few statistics about BI performance are relatively easy to obtain and quantify, such as usage data drawn from the logs of specific tools or portals. One trend that jumped out from Gleanster survey is that almost all companies seem to be more focused on metrics tied to business outcomes and not at usage metrics, which are easy to measure but not as valuable to the business.

At MicroStrategy World Europe event helded in Monte Carlo on July 2011, MicroStrategy announced two new enterprise products.

• MicroStrategy Gateway integrates with Facebook and allows you to easily query and analyze against the richest customer information database ever built. An iPhone app has already been created based on this technology and is available today for free as well as a free Facebook data mining service.
• MicroStrategy Cloud moves MicroStrategy into the service hosting business with multiple offerings including the ability to be truly elastic in increasing and decreasing resources on the fly or even using MicroStrategy hosted application instead of your own system and administrative resources.

by Bryan Brandow