RE: Business Objects with DB2 data -- MIDRANGE-L

Slapping a tool like BO and/or Crystal Reports onto your system is the wrong
approach. If you are having response time problems and "bugs", you have more
serious problems than trying to summarize sales.

Your new IT director needs to spend some money and get a systems expert to
review your situation. Programmers aren't going to help you here.

Paul Nelson
Cell 708-670-6978
Office 512-392-2577
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hoteltravelfundotcom
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2013 7:51 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Business Objects with DB2 data

OK this is definetly an eye opener for me and I thank you all for
responding. It seems to me that the first thing they need to do is get a
consultant who can go over these options as discussed.
The IT Director is new, and has no prior AS/400 background. The ownership
only knows one thing, that the current ERP is very slow and has many bugs
that need to be addressed on a constant basis by 2 outside consultants plus
one in house Manager-programmer. So requests for many needed reports have
been allocated to Crystal Reports hence they want to advance that to
Business Objects. Some reports that I have done lately for instance are
simple summaries of sales according to Product lines. They don't want
anything added to current AS/400 because of space. The upgrade to 7.1 is
planned but i need to find out which machine this will be, based on Rob's
idea.

On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 8:12 AM, Mike Cunningham
<mike.cunningham@xxxxxxx>wrote:

We have an instance of BO tied in to our iSeries DB2 using ODBC. We also
got BO when it came bundled with a Financial Package we purchased so we
decided to try and use it to also provide reporting services to all of our
i based data. What we did was write our own custom Extract/transform/load
(ETL) application that runs nightly on the iSeries and pulls all the data
needed for reporting and puts it in a different set of tables in a
different library formatted for reporting. BO then points to this library
only. Most Data warehouse setups to the same including the Financial
Package we purchased. In their case they take the data out of one MSSQL
database server and replicate it all to a second MS SQL server used by BO.

After training everyone to use BO and the reports then can get from the
data and all the 'cool' things it can do, we have exactly 0 users using

it.

Even after years of complaining that they had no reporting package like
other colleges had. We do have our research office using the i data for
many reports but they prefer to use Access. The database is the same, we
just allowed them ODBC access to the special library. They love it.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Hoteltravelfundotcom
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2013 5:50 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Business Objects with DB2 data

I am interested in hearing of any Iseries shops which use Business

Objects.

We are interested
in that product to use for reports and allowing users to create their own
reports.
I am concerned in that that AS/400 ERP we have is rather old product,
basically RPG from back in the 90's and data base is very bulky - any
experiences would be welcome.
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