Putting On My Presales Hat

I mentioned yesterday that I'm off to Ireland tomorrow, and the work I'm going to be doing for most of the week is a presales engagement for a public-sector organisation.

It's probably true to say that presales is probably the sort of work that I get the most enjoyment out of; you typically have to go in at the start of an engagement with a customer, try and understand their requirements - and the things that are most likely to make them want to use you - and then try and put a proposition together that meets their needs. You usually have to have a fairly good understanding of a lot of technologies, and to be a bit of a problem solver - you can't raise a TAR and wait for Oracle Support to get back as you've usually only got a couple of days to get the job done. The piece of work I'm doing next week is building a Discoverer, Portal and Reports demo and we're up against offerings from vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects. One of the things I'm most looking at getting my teeth into is using Reports to produce some highly formatted "statement-style" documents, lots of barcodes, multiple queries and so forth. If I get a chance I'll post an article on how this bit gets done.

A couple of bits of news. Nicholas Goodman posted on his blog the other day that he'd been made an Oracle ACE; well done Nick, thoroughly deserved and I'm looking forward to catching up with you this year. Nick's also presenting at the ODTUG Virtual Conference 2006 on OWB Paris, if you get a chance to register and watch the presentation I'm sure it'll be excellent.

There's a good little article over at IntelligentEnterprise on architectures for business intelligence product suites. If you're thinking about a proper architecture for your BI tools, or looking to evaluate offerings from the different vendors, it's a useful read.

Finally, Howard J. Rogers has created a Wiki on his Dizwell website to see whether it's something that the community might use and get some value out of. Wikis are "collaboratively edited websites" - the most famous one of course being Wikipedia - with the idea being that anyone can add content or edit it. I've often thought about an Oracle Business Intelligence wiki, to try and capture some of the knowledge that's out there, but I've always been mindful of just fragmenting the knowledge and sites that are already out there. I've set my own forum up, not as a rival to Oracle's own BI & Data Warehousing forums, but more as a way of documenting some of the questions and answers that get sent through to me directly. It'll be interesting to see how the wiki that Howard is hosting gets on, I suspect it'll take off as there's quite a collaborative community around the Dizwell site who are prepared to contribute as well as just read.