Hi,
I would like to ask a question. I have taken a 3 day manager’s course on BO awhile ago and would like to brush up my knowledge. Does anybody know if Business objects or any other company offer training for advanced users?
I looked at the Business Objects’ homepage and it seems that they offer only 1 day Advance Reporting course and 1 day Scripting class for experienced users.
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Mike Leshchiner
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
At 10:21 AM 18/06/98 -0600, you wrote:
Hi,
I would like to ask a question. I have taken a 3 day manager’s course on BO awhile ago and would like to brush up my knowledge. Does anybody know if Business objects or any other company offer training for advanced
users?..
Hi Mike:
Compuexcel is a BusObj certified consulting & training partner. Majority of the partners and BusinessObjects themselves offer only the standard training as part of their regular scheduled classes.
Our experience has been that while the topics covered in the standard BusinessObjects advanced course are quite good, it can use some sprucing up depending upon the audience (e.g. linking data providers, more juice on realistic Union/Intersect/Minus, Subqueries and specially on the variables side).
If you are having an on-site class, insist on having certain topics covered that are important to you (our clients sure do and rightly so!). You will find that the challange will be to FIND AN INSTRUCTOR WHO HAS TONNES OF HANDS ON EXPERIENCE WITH THE PRODUCT – it is cruicial for an advanced class!
I don’t know where you are but contact your local BusinessObjects or Partner office. If you like, please feel to contact me and I will be glad to provide you with some names (not just our company) of people who I know are very competent BusinessObjects trainers and you can take it from there.
Hope this helps.
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Contact Robert Schmidt ( WEB Page WWW.BOBooks.COM) at Schmidt Interactive Consulting.
He has an excellent Advanced User course (2 days) that was just completed at our Company. The Business Objects Advanced course is still at level 5.4.5 while
Roberts are updated to 4.1. (He wrote the previous advanced course for Bus Obj).
Bruce Hinrichs
Schneider National, Inc.
Green Bay, WI USA
HinrichsB@Schneider.Com
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Mike,
The advice about finding an instructor with a great deal of experience with the B. O. product and who is willing to tailor the training to your needs is certainly on the mark.
In addition, you might also want to look for someone with experience in the application that creates/maintains the databases on which your B. O. reporting will be based; or at least in very similar applications. This will help make the examples and the discussions that are part of the training more meaningful. Your application vendor(s) may be able to suggest some of their partners, VARs, etc. that are also knowledgeable in B.O.
Frank Johns
Technology Transfer Group, Inc.
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
X-cc: “Alan K Mayer (E-mail)” amayer@islink.com
I don’t know where you are located, but I believe Integra Solutions (Dallas, TX) to be a great resource for BO Training.
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
In response to the question about training, the generic classes are really not of much use if you are looking for advanced information because of the variety of environments and circumstances under which the product can be used. There is one Business Objects Certified Training Partner I know of that offers customized on-site training classes . The level, duration and content of each class is determined by you.
The firm is located in Greenwich, Connecticut but has trained in various cities throughout the U.S. and Europe and all of their instructors have a minimum of five years experience in using Business Objects in different environments. If you are interested in using them, the contact there is Liz Ashare and the company name is Norbert Technologies (1-800-915-2666).
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
I do not believe that in order for an advanced course to be useful, it must customized. The principals are the same no matter what environment you are in. If this were true, then there would be no such thing as a reference manual. Every company would have their own and when an employee left, the employees would have to learn all over again.
It is true that a customized course would be better, if it contained everything a standard course contained. This is because, the students will be more familiar with the environment. However, to assume that a course is worthless because it is not customized, is rather pretentious and sounds like a great marketing ploy.
Robert
Schmidt Interactive Software, Inc.
In response to the question about training, the generic classes are really not of much use if you are looking for advanced information because of the variety of environments and circumstances under which the product can be used. There is one Business Objects Certified Training Partner I know of that offers customized on-site training classes . The level, duration and content of each class is determined by you.
The firm is located in Greenwich, Connecticut but has trained in various cities throughout the U.S. and Europe and all of their instructors have a minimum of five years experience in using Business Objects in different environments. If you are interested in using them, the contact there is Liz Ashare and the company name is Norbert Technologies (1-800-915-2666).
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
In a message dated 98-06-20 23:36:36 EDT, you write:
I do not believe that in order for an advanced course to be useful, it must customized. The principals are the same no matter what environment you are in.
I would agree with this sentiment for the User courses. However, there is a definite place for customized designer courses. In the current environment, where the training database is MS Access, no effort is spent in understanding the SQL language. When a student leaves the class, he or she has an understanding of the different features of the Designer product and how to create a universe. But, as evidenced by a number of questions that occur on this list, there is a definite need for additional database specific knowledge.
In the “Old Days” (Business Objects 3.x) the equivalent to the current Designer class was database specific. In other words, if you were going to use Oracle as your target database, we covered Oracle SQL in the Designer class. If you were going to use Sybase, then Sybase SQL was covered. Why?
Because the better you knew your target database SQL, the better your objects could be. And the better your objects, the better your universe. Being database specific also allowed us to cover issues such as outer joins that have different restrictions depending on the target database… outer joins are not covered adequately in the current Designer course. It also allowed us to cover database specific functions, such as Decode() for Oracle, or charindex() and replicate() and so on for Sybase. In Informix we actually taught how to create and use additional database functions as the standard Informix set is fairly small.
There is a whole series of tricks using the sign() function that we used to cover… none of this is available in the standard Designer class at this time.
Unfortunately the target audience for this type of class is much smaller than that for user training. Also, the person that does the training must not only know Business Objects inside and out, but know a variety of database languages / feature sets inside and out. That type of person can be difficult to find! For that reason I suspect that we won’t see this type of training offered as formal classes by BusinessObjects.
On the other hand, I hear that the training materials are being updated. We have not had a chance to review the new material as of yet. The new Designer class is listed as being a two day course, so perhaps they have addressed some of these issues.
At our company we have toyed with the idea of creating Advanced Designer classes to fill this gap. Since we already had created database specific training material for the 3.x classes, it would not have been too difficult. We have not done so for a variety of reasons… the main one being that it would be difficult to sell for the reasons listed above. (We are, after all, a business. We need to sell our products!)
One solution that we offer is an on-site “mentoring” session, either one-to- one or one-to-many with the universe designer(s). We then can spend time talking about the target database, and cover specific design issues based on their data model.
As I said before, I agree with Robert in that customized user training is not always required. There is a benefit to creating training that does use the user’s own data instead of Island Resorts, but the main features of the Business Object user module are the same no matter what. That is, of course, one of the main selling points of the product! But on the training for the Designer product there is a void that can be filled. We will have to wait and see what the new training material provides.
Regards,
Dave Rathbun
Integra Solutions
www.islink.com See you in Orlando in '98!
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Hi Mike,
I live on the East Coast and have taken several classes with Schmidt Interactive Software. You can find them on www.bobooks.com. The advanced user class is very challenging, and it is almost guaranteed that you will walk away from this class knowing a WHOLE lot more about the power of Business Objects.
Laurenf@bellatlantic.net
Mike Lesh wrote:
Hi,
I would like to ask a question. I have taken a 3 day manager’s course on BO awhile ago and would like to brush up my knowledge. Does anybody know if Business objects or any other company offer training for advanced users?
I looked at the Business Objects’ homepage and it seems that they offer only 1 day Advance Reporting course and 1 day Scripting class for experienced users.
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Mike Leshchiner
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)