Milroy: I came from the BusinessObjects side, so my background is in business intelligence, information management, and I now head up the BusinessObjects Community as part of the SAP Community Network. We started in January last year at the time SAP acquired BusinessObjects, but we didn't really get the community migrated over until October. Since then, it's only been about six or seven months, and it's totally taken off.

It's good, and I think one thing to point out is that it's historical BusinessObjects, so we have the kind of people that purchase Crystal Reports and come to the site and use it, as well as a lot of the BusinessObjects customers. But also, I think one thing that's really interesting is that a lot of the SCN and BPX members are finding a lot of information, a lot of documents, articles and products inside for them, because a lot of them are starting to buy and use BusinessObjects products and install it on top of SAP products. We've got a lot of information there to help them along the way.

Reed: If I'm new to the BusinessObjects Community, what's the first thing I should know in order to get more involved?

Milroy: Whether you're new or have been there for a bit, I think the first place to go is to check with the portal pages. The way we've designed it is for someone to go into the portal pages and find out about the product. There's content there, articles, but it is also a landing point for people to come in and read about the products, then jump off onto other places. They can go check out the articles, the sample dashboards, the form support area, webinars, e-learning and everything else - all the "goodies" that are part of a solid community out there.

If you're too busy for that, there are two great ways to start: the weekly webinars and the newsletters. The weekly webinar is just an hour of your day. Some topics are interesting and some topics are not interesting for whatever your needs are. That's really taken off; we've had a lot of activity with that. Then the newsletter is sent out once a month, and you can check out what the top articles are, click on them to read them, and if they're not of particular interest, you can let it roll by.

Reed: You mentioned the popularity of the forums. What are some of the hot topics under discussion in the BusinessObjects forums now?

Milroy: The forums have really taken off. We had about 2,000 forum posts when we started, but now it's about 8,000 posts and replies a month. That's a 400% increase, which is pretty big. It covers a big breadth, so we have quite a few products: over 20 forums and a lot of activity in all of them. Some of the big ones have been the Crystal Reports for Eclipse, so that's where people can integrate Crystal Reports inside their actual Eclipse application. That's really exploded. Enterprise Platform is another. That's been a new addition for us, not from a product sense but from a community sense, and it's really exploded as well. We also have a lot of people looking to install, configure and deploy, security administration.

One of the hottest areas, though, has been the BusinessObjects on SAP area. A lot of SAP people are really interested in what's going on there, so they're installing the software, getting started with it and you can see them asking the questions. They're coming in and they've got the product installed and they have Crystal Reports going, working on top of BW or ERP and then moving on to web intelligence to do the ad hoc and query sort of thing.

One of the topics that came up recently was the dashboard tool Xcelsius. Right now, Xcelsius goes through an interesting way: you have to connect to Crystal Reports to actually get the data. I think people will be pretty happy later in the year because we're actually going to be integrating it such that it can do queries right against BW. Those are the types of questions we're getting in, people are asking how they can get it to go right against BW, how they can get queries and retrieve the data.

Reed: So it sounds like there's a lot going on in terms of connecting the dots between the new BusinessObjects products that have a lot of buzz and the nitty-gritty of connecting it into BW systems, etc. that's going on in the forums right now.

Milroy: Absolutely, we're seeing a huge spike in there.

Reed: This is the kind of job market where an SAP professional needs any edge they can get, and one of the ways to keep your skills sharp is getting access to hands-on training. I know you have some of that going on in your community. Can you tell us about some of the hands-on products you can get into on the BusinessObjects Community?

Milroy: I must admit I don't know all the SAP technology as well as I know the BusinessObjects technology, but a bit of a paradigm shift for SAP users is that BusinessObjects is really easy to install and get started to use. Ultimately, the products are for end users to just pick up and begin using. One of the first things to do if you want to get immersed in it is to download some of the free trials. On the site, there is a free trial link on the right: you can download Crystal Reports, you can download Xcelsius, and when you download it you get a 30-day license key so you can install it, you can start building reports and showing data. There's no limitation there.

The big one is the BusinessObjects Edge, which is the mid-market offering that matches the Enterprise offering. It's limited to one server, but you can set up security, add users, schedule things, upload Crystal Reports documents. That has been a really popular area for people to kind of get in, get started and get their hands dirty.

Reed: Now, Polestar is one of the BusinessObjects products that has a real buzz in the SAP world currently, and there's a Polestar OnDemand contest going on through InnoCentive right now that's wrapping up probably pretty soon after our podcast is issued. What can you tell us about that, and how can SCN members put their hat in the ring there?

Milroy: That's a cool one. We kind of struck up a deal with InnoCentive last year, and we've just been basically looking for opportunities to leverage this to support the community. We're actually in beta of this Polestar OnDemand, which is a data discovery tool. It's almost like flying through your data in an abstract sense: it allows you to look at your data, see where there are clumps of data together as opposed to sparse areas, and then see correlations in that. It's just a single view tool; you just click and select columns, it's very easy to use.

We've created a challenge to promote that and encourage people to start using it. The challenge is a contest to win $20,000 for people to build a connector from the cloud solution that connects to a data source - either it's running on your machine and you expose it via the cloud or the internet, or you can upload data and those sorts of things. Basically we provide the EPI's and we provide the product site right there. It's online so you can just go there, write a solution and submit it via InnoCentive.

We'll choose one solution at the end and award the prize. I think that ends April 7, so people probably have about a week or so to get started on it. It doesn't take that long. It takes about an hour for a novice user who's never seen the product before to be able to build a solution.