Getting Personal with Publications and Profiles

Today is the second day of the 2009 SAP BusinessObjects User Conference in Dallas, Texas.  This afternoon, I’ll be presenting my second of three breakouts, “Getting Personal with Publications and Profiles.”  This breakout was a bit of a challenge.  On one hand, it’s a remix of my very first user conference presentation that I gave at Insight 2006 in San Francisco, California.  On the other hand, publication capabilities on the XI 3.0/XI 3.1 platform is much more robust than what was possible on XI R2 in 2006.  Honestly, I think two hours would be required to get through everything thoroughly.  So certain topics didn’t make the final cut.  But I’m keeping to an hour and hope that everyone stays awake (I’m presenting at 4 PM – the last breakout slot).

Publications serve a noble role – the efficient bursting of personalized information to a large audience.  I’m currently helping a customer migrate from Business Objects 5.1.8.  From a distance, it looks like there are hundreds of scheduled jobs in Broadcast Agent that need rescheduling on XI.  But upon closer inspection, there are really just a handful of reports that have dozens of variations to support personalization.  Although it’s not within scope of the migration project, I hope that my client will look into publications and see how it can reduce the complexity of too many reports and too many scheduled jobs to maintain.

Do you have a “success story” with Business Objects publications?  Feel free to comment and share your success.