Attended BusinessObjects Information Management Services Academy, Oct 5-8 2009

This week, I attended a workshop organized by BusinessObjects Information Management Servicess Academy. It was a four days hands-on workshop with BusinessObjects consultants flying in from Australia and Singapore. There were professionals from other System Integrators as well.

The agenda for the workshop was -

• Connecting to sources
• Data Assessment
• Data Validation
• Implementing Change Data Detection
• Implementing Delta Loading
• Implementing Slowly Changing Dimension
• Working with Global Address Cleanse
• Working with Data Cleanse
• Universal Data Cleanse: Creating a Custom Parser (for custom Data Cleansing)
• Using Match
• Implementing Consolidation
• Working with Candidate Select
• Implementing Real-time (Global Cleanse and Candidate Select)

We copied a 50 GB VMware image of Windows 2003 server on our laptops. It had all the necessary software and data. So setup was not complicated but copying 50 GB image took good amount of time.

I liked the data quality transforms that Data Services offers specially GlobalAddressCleanse transform. It basically cleans the incoming addresses are per the inbuilt address dictionary. Currently, they have address dictionaries for US, EMEA, New Zealand and Japan. Soon they are going to come up with a similar dictionary for Indian addresses.

Overall, I would say it was a good experience :) .