Anyone willing to give some advice in Tampa FL area?

Question

Post Author: hcso
CA Forum: General Feedback
I live and work in the Tampa/St. Petersburg FL area and was looking for a company that has implemented and using Business Objects Enterprise XI Release 2 SP2.  Preferrably with SQL Server 2000, IIS, .NET and Crystal Reports XI R2, Active Directory authentication, on a Windows Server 2003 machine and a data mart.
Even if it is a different version, different database, using Java, different anything, I just would love to speak with someone and get any feedback, tidbits, direction, anything.  I cannot find any user groups or I would be the first one there!
I am working on this project by myself from scratch for what is going to turn into a portal for thousands of employees.  I am teaching myself BOXI Enterprise using forums, books, BOXI manuals, BOXI support and Google.  I have never worked with Active Directory or servers, networking, I am a Crystal Reports person and SQL.  This is a new and challenging project but of course it is needed yesterday and I am desperate for help.  My company is not able to send me to training or I would be there.
Even if it's just a few spare moments of anyone's time I just would love to speak with you or someone that is the administrator BOXIE or uses it, works with it, anything.  I'll come to your business if possible or speak on the phone.
I have questions like, who set it up?  How many people set it up?  What did you do first?  Benefits with using business views and universes.  How difficult was it to roll out.  Did you train the users?  Did you hire a consultant.
Again, anyone willing to speak to me, in person, on the phone, through e-mail, whatever means I would greatly appreciate it.  I'm about to start calling business' if I can find them online that use BOXIE and see if I can speak to someone.
Thank you so much for any replies.  If anyone knows of business' even I will call and see if an IT manager would let me talk to them just for a few or come and see their deployment.  This may be asking to much but you never know.
If there are any replies I'll be glad to share my contact information.

Answer 1

Post Author: GraemeG
CA Forum: General Feedback
Hello mate
I am probably the exact opposite of being local to you! If you'd like to have a chat anyway, we could do some time difference sums and swap details.
We're using Crystal XI for our development over a combination of DB2 (iSeries M3 ERP), SQL Server (online customer app), SQL Server (product imaging)SQL Server Express (Client based scheduling ), Access (legacy quoting system), MySQL (web-based quality and improvement apps) and a SQL Server-based DataMart and OLAP warehousing tool.
We server our BI through Lawson Business Intelligence (LBI) which is built around BOXIE but proved to be more cost effective than BOXIE which we evaluated at the same time. We have about 10 years of experience creating and deploying Crystal-based BI.
Drop me a line if you'd like.
Cheers, Graeme