A good and optimal Universe design is very crucial to any Business Objects Business Intelligence Solution. Be it the WebIntelligence reports or Xcelsius dashboards a good universe can do wonders to the performance, usability and ad hoc capability of the BI solution.

Following are some basic and quick checkpoints to review a Universe Design before finalizing the development:

• A generic user id should be created and used in the Universe connection parameters instead of the developer’s personal ID.
• Database owner name should not be prefixed to the table names
• If the customer does not have their own standards define some naming conventions and use them.

Many things need to happen to have a successful migration from a legacy application to a new system.  There are difficult data mapping decisions that need to be made and data quality concerns to be addressed.  There are the typical challenges of change management and end user training.  In large efforts, entire teams may be dedicated to profiling and remediation of legacy data.  In the midst of all this migration activity sits a critical and often underestimated function – reporting.  What happens to all the analytical, transactional and operational reports the legacy system provided and where do users go for that data in the new world?

It seems like everyone wants to deploy a mobile BI solution these days.  The idea of location awareness and the freedom to access data from anywhere at anytime has generated a lot of excitement.  From a software perspective BI vendors are fueling the mobile BI market with “out of the box” solutions for most of the major mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry).  At the same time we have had an almost overnight adoption of tablets that make mobile BI more usable thanks to the larger screen size.