"It’s a great place to learn real technical content, as opposed to some of the other conferences . . . this conference has met and exceeded my expectations. This has been the single greatest source of information at any conference I have been to yet."-Jason Jones, Kroger
Essbase and Hyperion Symposium
Moderated by Al Marciante, Oracle Corporation
Oracle’s Sunday Symposium at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 will give attendees a unique preview to upcoming development work in Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management applications and Business Intelligence Platform. The symposium includes demos, prototypes, and slide content, as well as interactive Q&A for attendees to provide feedback to help validate and shape the features under development. The all-day symposium is planned to include previews in the following areas:
EPM Foundation and common services
Oracle Hyperion Planning
Oracle Hyperion Financial Management
Oracle Essbase
Oracle Business Intelligence
Other projects in development
This symposium is offered for in-person attendees, and will not be recorded or available for download.
Hyperion Presentations
Advanced Financial Management Andy Jorgenson, Pinnacle
Join us for this informative session where we’ll cover some of the advanced topics and tools for financial management. We’ll give you the tuning and optimization guidelines used by consultants when implementing Financial Management. Examples of topics include learning how EPM Architect can simplify your application maintenance and deployment, how custom dimensions can simplify metadata, rules, grids and reports, and how Financial Data Quality Management can provide improved integrations with your source systems.
John Weimar, Kerdock Consulting Tips and Tricks: HFM to Oracle Essbase using Extended Analytics
Essbase
Did you know there is a seamless way to combine Hyperion Financial Management information with operational data? This session will get you there fast. Come here how to interface between HFM and Essbase using Extended Analytics and AIS.
Politics of Hyperion Gary Crisci, Morgan Stanley
Essbase
The focus of this session is to discuss ways Essbase can be integrated into large IT organizations where other BI tools are well entrenched and come up with positive strategies for IT and finance to partner together for successful implementations.
Managing your EPM applications centrally via EPM Architect Michael Casey, Oracle Corporation
Best practice discussion on how to manage an EPM application environment with EPM architect.
Workarounds for Those Little Things You Hate in Hyperion
Speaker to be Determined
There are many tools in Essbase that are hardly known and very helpful for those moments when you feel that the application is limited or not giving you the right results. In this session, we will explore Essbase to the limit using UDA's, Alternate Alias Tables, System Variables, buckets, anchors, short formulas and more in order to bring the best solution to the most common problems a Developer experiences.
Key Considerations for a Successful Hyperion Planning Implementation Chris Churchill, Ranzal & Associates
This session is designed to walk business and IT professionals through the steps involved in carrying out a successful Hyperion Planning implementation. The session will begin with a review of the key phases involved in a planning project. Next, best practice design considerations will be covered, with real-world use cases as examples. The final topic will cover some unique use cases for Hyperion Planning outside of the everyday financial forecast and budget arena.
Making Your Life Easier with Planning Utilities
Keith Amann, Monsanto Company
Planning and Shared Services offer utilities to ease the security maintenance and migration process for administrators. Join us for this important session where we’ll review each of the utilities available for Hyperion Planning and learn how to import security, upload metadata and data from a single csv file, and more.
Top Ten Tips for Improving Hyperion Planning Tracy McMullen, interRel Consulting
Are your Hyperion Planning forms retrieving too slowly? Does it take forever to submit your data back to Planning? Do your business rules take forever to run? If you want to improve the performance of your existing system, join Oracle ACE Directors for Hyperion, Tracy McMullen and Edward Roske as they cover the Top Ten Tips for Hyperion Planning. In this session you'll learn loading, calculation, and retrieval tricks for increasing your performance more than ninety-five percent!
How To Collect Budget Data Across 20-30 Curtis Neumann, AT&T
Collecting very granular Plan data with over twenty dimensions in Hyperion Planning, which uses Essbase as its underlying data storage repository, is challenging due to the inherent issue with Essbase’s poor performance beyond fifteen dimensions. Hyperion Planning’s Smartlists in combination with a data link to an ASO cube creates the ability to collect very granular data and provide powerful analytics with great performance on both ends.
Out of the Box: Creative Solutions for Hyperion Planning Tracy McMullen, interRel Consulting
Join us to learn how we've addressed some interesting Planning requirements like applying security across different plan types. We’ll review critical design decisions when implementing Planning and learn how to think out of the box with Planning.
Workarounds for Everything That's Missing in Hyperion Planning Natalie Delemar, Randstad US
Hyperion Planning can do ninety-five percent of what we want it to, but how do we deal with the five percent that it can't handle? Have you ever wanted to do things like change the graphics and wording inside Planning, link two page drop-downs together, add validation run custom audit reports, or modify the outline on the fly? You'll want to join us as we demonstrate workarounds for all those things that bug you in Hyperion Planning.
Upgrade Oracle Hyperion Planning from 9x to 11.1.1 Juha Kilpinen, The Hackett Group
Learn how to successfully upgrade Hyperion Planning to 11.1.1 version. This presentation will describe how to install and configure the 11.1.1 release, migrate the application meta data and data, as well as users and business rules. This presentation will also include best practices description, which can help our customer to successfully upgrade their planning environment. A brief 11.1.1 functional overview will also be provided.
Learn how to build business rules for Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Hyperion Financial management using the new Web-based and graphical product called Calculation Manager. As a business rule developer or administrator, learn how to reduce the time for designing and maintaining business rules, and how better to share the calculation logic with the business users. Also learn how to benefit from best practices provided by calculation manager for standard calculations such as allocations, aggregation, etc.
Allocating Expenses: An Introduction to Hyperion Profitability & Cost Management Vijay Lal, Oracle Corporation
Allocating expenses in Essbase is hard but Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) simplifies things. The newest Oracle EPM application, Oracle’s HPCM software sits entirely on top of Essbase. With a single graphical view, it allows users to look at the drivers of costs as they “audit” the profitability of their organization. Assessing company profitability is a fairly clean, well understood process but understanding profits and margins by customer or product is much more difficult.
Oracle EPM Goes Beyond Hyperion: Introduction to the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Product Suite Tracy McMullen, interRel Consulting
After Oracle’s purchase of Siebel Systems in 2006, Oracle soon came to realize that it had found a diamond in the rough hidden among Siebel’s many products now branded as Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition ) and being positioned as Oracle’s flagship BI. Our introduction will expound on how you can leverage Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition as a complete solution.
Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead Consulting OBIEE Answers+ on Essbase: The Future of Ad-Hoc Analysis
Back in the old days before the Oracle acquisition of Hyperion, you probably used Hyperion Web Analysis as your default front-end on top of Essbase cubes. In the modern world of 2009, there's a better solution: OBIEE Answers+ sitting directly on Essbase. Answers is more robust, feature-rich, and frankly, more powerful than Web Analysis ever dreamed of being. In this session, you'll learn how to use Answers on Essbase, leaving Web Analysis behind as you stay on the forefront of cutting edge ad-hoc analysis.
Holy Crap It’s Down—Troubleshooting Tips and Techniques for Oracle EPM Rob Donahue, interRel Consulting
This presentation will give tips and techniques on how to identify and resolve problems in an Oracle EPM environment. The information will include best practices as relates to troubleshooting, and tips to prevent the occurrence of common problems.
Automating EPM—the Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Quinlan Eddy, Star Analytics
Automation of EPM systems is often an afterthought that ultimately results in kluges of baling string and twine to hold the system together. As a result, systems are manually refreshed, contain scripts with unencrypted clear passwords, rarely have any form of error handling and surface cryptic logging. Moreover, the myriad of customized scripts are very costly to maintain and represent significant risk of suboptimal performance. In this presentation, various out-of-the box automation solutions will be presented that will address the needs from smaller EPM deployments to large scale multi-platform environments. We will address the need to ensure systems are running, provide the ability to securely delegate and schedule automation tasks, and ultimately maximize the up time while mitigating the risks of automation failures. Various options and comparative information will be presented.
Come test our Hyperion knowledge! ODTUG Kaleidoscope is home to some of the finest Hyperion minds on the planet. In attendance at our conference will be world renowned experts including three Oracle ACE Directors for Hyperion, three Oracle ACEs for Hyperion, several original developers of Essbase, Hyperion administrators and developers with more than ten years of experience, and the top consultants from Hyperion consulting firms all over America. These individuals are all going to be sitting on a panel ready to answer your toughest Hyperion questions. Questions will be gathered during the first two days of the conference and also taken from the audience during the actual session. This will be the most informative panel on Hyperion ever (and there will be lots of free chocolate provided).
It’s Stable and I’m Convinced: Now How Do I Upgrade to Hyperion 11x?
Lester Trough, The Hackett Group
Thinking of upgrading to Hyperion 11x from an earlier version? Then you definitely don’t want to miss this extremely informative and relevantly timely presentation on upgrading to 11x. We’ll tell you all you need to know in order to make the transition to 11x as smoothly and seamlessly as possible and, more importantly, how to do it right the first time!
Getting More Value from Oracle’s EPM Usage Tracking Service
Wayne Van Sluys, TopDown Consulting
Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Workspace Usage Tracking module allows administrators to monitor system logins, what content is being opened or viewed, including when, and by whom. This session will show how tools such as Oracle Data Integrator can be used to move data from the repository into a data mart, allowing administrators to use reporting and analysis tools to gain a more complete view of the server usage and the content being viewed.
Advanced Interactive Reporting
Speaker to be Determined
How are people REALLY using Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting)? You'll learn some intermediate to advanced methods for creating and managing reports, detailed analysis, and dashboards against relational and multi-dimensional database sources. We’ll cover several advanced tips and tricks on optimizing your reports, making them look beautiful, and the best ways to incorporate new System 9 and 11 features and functionality like Essbase Cube Query. The presenter is a long-time user of Interactive Reporting dating all the way back to the earliest Brio days, so you'll see several real-world demonstrations of sophisticated information delivery via Interactive Reporting.
Advanced Smart View: Into the Details of Word and PowerPoint Integration Michael Sting, BDO Seidman, Llp
Smart View is the new common Hyperion add-in for Microsoft Office including Word and PowerPoint. It can be used with all of the Hyperion products like Planning, Web Analysis, Financial Reporting, Essbase and more. You’ve probably seen Smart View in Excel and wonder why should I switch from the Excel Add-in? During this presentation, we’ll focus on how you can integrate Hyperion content into Word and PowerPoint (which as you know isn’t possible with our beloved Excel Add-in) including learning write letters in Word that include Essbase numbers, making PowerPoint presentations using graphs from Web Analysis and sending via Outlook your Planning numbers to your manager. We’ll show you real world examples of creating dynamic reports and presentations using linked Hyperion content. In the newest 11x release, Smart View has an improved connection interface and new features like Smart Slices and Report Designer. Financial Reporting has two features that you've been waiting for years to see: annotations in a report and the ability to bundle external content (like Word documents and Excel spreadsheets) into a book of reports. Interactive Reporting has dramatically enhanced dashboarding and graphing capabilities (including gauges and animated charts). SQR Production Reporting now has a simple interface for putting multiple data sources into a single report. Web Analysis now has advanced calculation capabilities and greater report formatting control. Workspace has so many new features (including Search and enhanced security) that it would take a paragraph to list them all. Don’t miss this chance to see Smart View in action with Word and PowerPoint including some of the new features in Smart View 11x.
Integrating Reporting and Analysis Products : Get more of your Enterprise Performance Management with BI Gauthier Vasseur, Google
Business Intelligence solutions are the face of Performance Management. Extending their use beyond intermediate data processing or just final reporting can not only maximize return on investment but also increase overall process quality and efficiency while dramatically improving user experience. Learn new ways of positioning BI and analytics when overall process performance is your key driver.
Managing Migrations with Lifecycle Management
Janette Hollar, Development
Manage the migration of Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management System release 11.1.1 between development, test and production with the new Hyperion Shared Services Lifecycle Management functionality. Lifecycle Management migrates applications or artifacts in a consistent and repeatable manner across environments.
OBIEE: Overview We'll take a tour through the tool that Oracle (for the moment) calls OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. We'll take a look at Answers, then Dashboards. Well also look at Delivers and iBots. Well take a look at Briefing Books and lastly, how BI Publisher fits into OBIEE. At each piece of the tool, well show you a demo of how that piece works and what its function is. So, this first session is an overview of the pieces that makeup OBIEE and a quick demo of these pieces and how they fit together.
OBIEE: Creating Your First App We'll use what we learned in the first session and then expand that to this hands-on session where you will create your first OBIEE dashboard and report. OBIEE is, as we learned in the first session, made up of several pieces. We'll go through a simple requirement, using each piece of OBIEE, and build a simple application. Though it may be simple, it will allow you to see how quickly you will be able to build robust interactive Dashboards and meaningful Reports using OBIEE.
OBIEE: Taking It to the Next Level Though OBIEE is capable of using any ODBC-compliant database as a data source, using Essbase allows OBIEE to use an OLAP data source instead of the impedance mismatch of having OBIEE using relational data. OBIEE is an excellent UI to expose data in Essbase. Setting up Essbase as a data source is quite simple. Well show you how to take data from its original source in relational tables in OBIEE, extract that data from OBIEE, then re-map the business model to use an Essbase cube as its data source. This is a hands-on session where you will see how to use Essbase as a data source for OBIEE.
Introducing Jdeveloper In this session, you will learn how to download, install and perform the basic configuration, with a focus on the Essbase Java API, of the Oracle JDeveloper Java Integrated Development Environment. You will also learn basic Java concepts including how to create a new Java application and project and how to create a new Java class by creating the classic Java ‘Hello World’ application.
Java API: The Basics
In this session, you will learn the basic structure of the Essbase Java API, how to use it to connect to a given Essbase server, application and database, how to layout a data retrieval grid and how to retrieve data into the grid.
Java API: Building Your First App In this session, you will learn how to use the Essbase Java API to calculate an Essbase database, query member information from the database, and perform multiple retrieval operations from the database.
Building a Simple Model with Essbase Studio
This session covers the fundamental capabilities of building and deploying models with Essbase Studio. After completing the session participants should understand the complete process in moving from data source to deployment. Participants will work with both relational and text connections; create basic dimensions; create alias sets; create cube models; and deploy Essbase cubes.
Creating mini-schema and dimensions with Essbase Studio
This session focuses on the steps required to prepare data sources for Essbase studio data loads and dimension builds. The session also focuses on more advanced dimension building techniques. This includes:
•Creating joins across relational tables and text files
•Building from recursive tables and files (parent and child builds)
•Creating attribute dimensions and alternate hierarchies
•Filtering data elements
•Creating custom data elements
Advanced Essbase Studio Capabilities
This session covers some of the more advanced capabilities of the Essbase Studio. Participants will work with some of the optional, but important capabilities these include:
• Creating alternate data source bindings
• Incremental dimensional updates
• Creating and executing drill through reports
• Performing lineage tracking
Leveraging Essbase Data Types
This session lets users work with various data types inherent in the Essbase server. Participants work with data types introduced over the last two major releases. These include:
Date-time dimensions
Text and date measures and members
Varying attributes
Essbase Version 11.x General New Features
This session provides a hands-on overview of key new features in the 9.3.x and 11.x releases of Essbase. New features covered in previous sessions will be mentioned for context, but will not be covered in a hands on fashion. This session covers:
denotes Oracle ACE
denotes Oracle ACE Director