Thursday, November 29, 2007

Hide

Airport lounge again.

Why do people think that business travel is glamorous?



ANYway, I'm bored enough to finally figure out how people are hiding their contacts in LinkedIn. There is a setting you can change in the profile, but I'll let you find out how.

The big question is why you would hide your contacts.

The whole point of LinkedIn is to NETWORK, make contact with people in your business area and share information, ideas, recruit, learn.

I suspect it the recruit thing that puts people off. I do know that recruitment agencies will use the system to their advantage, but surely it is to your advantage too - you get to find out about roles.

Anyway, feel free to browse through my contacts, and if you see someone you may need - a fellow OBIEE consultant maybe - then get in touch with them.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Complete Blogger

Like all good bloggers I am finally able to sit in an airport lounge and write something about my day.

I'm off to a client in the North so am flying out of Southampton.
I may go to the pub tonight and may have a dinner with someone.

Whilst there, I will work on some issues with OBIEE 10.1.3.3.

There.
done it.

I am now a complete blogger !!!

Monday, November 26, 2007

New LinkedIn Group

If you are using the Networking tool LinkedIn, I have created a group for Oracle Business Intellegence professionals. Look out for the group on my profile, and join in if you think it is appropriate for you.
I will connect anyone who is working in OBIEE, Siebel Analytics, Oracle Business Intelgence (such as OWB).

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/43109/526A0219C124

Friday, November 23, 2007

OBI EE Consultants Needed

The OBIEE world is still going strong and demand is high. We need a couple more consultants - one experienced contractor for a project in Germany where we are the technical leaders, and one junior (on a decent salary).

If you are ready for a new project/consultancy then do get in touch.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Remembrance Day petition



http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/remembermonday/

A petition has been launched requesting a new public holiday falling on the Monday after Rembrance Sunday in November each year.


To be known as the National Remembrance Holiday, it's purpose is threefold:

  1. To emphasise the remembrance of those servicemen and women who have given, and continue to give, their lives for Britain.
  2. To remind people of the importance of protecting our Nation and what it stands for.
  3. To break that 3 month period between the August Public Holiday and Christmas when there are currently no long weekends, especially as the UK has fewer public holidays than most European Countries.


If you are in agreement, please sign up to the petition
- it only takes a few moments - and it would be great if you were minded to forward the link to other people as well.


Thank you for your time.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Using Catalog Manager

If you want to have a consistent Header or Footer on each page of your dashboards then you can add the default settings to your custom messages file and all NEW reports will have the same settings. You can edit these settings per page afterwards. However, if you have built loads of pages on various dashboards and the Business Analyst comes along and says, 'oh I forgot to say we need a confidentiallity clause at the bottom of each page' you smile through gritted teeth and are faced with a large task of opening each page and editing the print formatting. If you have lots of formats to make this can take some time. The alternative is to dig into the Catalog manager and edit the xml for each page directly. This takes half the time to go through each page. Open the Catalog Manager and navigate to the _portals folder.







Now select the properties for the page (make sure you don't pick the dashboard layout).























Edit the page xml.





The trick here is not to write your own xml!! Copy the xml from one you set up manually in the dashboard editor.






Here I copied in a message about the system being restricted and a nice green message!

The tag added is saw:pageProps

notice saw:pageHeader show="false" / and saw:showFooter showondashboard="true" show="true"

simple really.

UI Messages

The most popular customisation for OBIEE is the colour scheme, which you will know is done by Skin/Schema.
This is great but you then come to change the wording and it is not done by skin/schema.
You can update the file uimessages.xml to change the links on the menu, so for example Dashboards could be replaced with 'Sailing' and the link can be changed (in the controlmessages.xml file), but this covers all skins being presented. On of the forum responses recently suggested that the javascript can be altered on a skin by skin basis but I can't find any reference to the messages being presented. I'll keep looking but if you know send a quick reply :)

The normal method for updating messages is to create an entry in your custom messages file, but htis requires you to know which message table the message relates to. This would be fine but this area is not fully documented (in the public domain at least:).

I'll experiment and let you know if I can find the relevent massage table setting to use. In the meantime this type of message customisation has to take place in the original files (which you hopfully have a backup of!)

The Cowes

The Cowes
Cowes Racing