Oracle Business Intelligence & DW Forum
One or two of you might be aware that I've been hosting an Oracle Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Forum on this site for the last six months (you can access it from the "Forum" tab at the top of each page). The idea behind it was to put together a place where we could discuss the specifics of Oracle's BI tools (Discoverer, Reports, Portal etc) together with the related server technologies (OLAP, Oracle RDBMS, Application Server and so on). Obviously the risk with any new forum is that you end up "forking" the ones that are already there, but I thought that we might end up creating a kind of Oracle BI&W community, in the same way that say Howard has around the Dizwell forum or Tom does around AskTom.
Looking back at it after six months, I guess it's kind of worked, in that there's about three pages of topics and a couple of hundred registered users, but what's happened is that it's pretty much been myself and a couple of others (Peter Scott mostly, with a couple of replies from people like David Aldridge and Mark Malakanov) who have done the replies, with most postings being people just looking for help with a particular tool problem. Anyway, what with the amount of time I'm away, and the fact I've got a young family, I've not had the chance to answer many questions myself recently and I started to think about shutting it down and directing people to the OTN forums instead. I posted something to this effect on the forum, and in fact a couple of people, Peter Scott again and Doug Burns, picked up on this and suggested people take a look and see if they can contribute something. Thanks Pete and Doug, that's a nice thing to to. Doug did make an interesting point later on actually, that the Oracle BI world is a bit different to Oracle server, where you're all using one product as opposed to Oracle BI, where everyone's using a different tool and the questions are very tool-specific. So maybe a "general" BI forum will never work? We'll have to wait and see.
One thing Doug's intervention did do though was point out that the new account activation process wasn't working. I originally had it set up so that you could activate your own account but the process got hijacked by spammers, who started creating accounts for themselves and then posted spam topics and replies. I changed it around so that the forum software sent me an activation email, but they've never come through, hence if you're still waiting for your account to be activated, drop me an email and I'll sort it out. Sorry. For now, I've set it back to user activation, but if it gets abused again, I'll have to consider something else.
So, the state of play now is that the forum is still running, and it's still the place for you to post questions about Oracle's BI&W tools, or to discuss any aspect of Oracle business intelligence & data warehousing. If it takes off, I'll keep it going, but if it doesn't, well that's life and I'll try something else. In the meantime though, surely someone's got an opinion about Oracle BI&W - what do you think of the new Siebel Analytics tools? Where do you think this leaves Discoverer? What about the new OWB pricing and packaging? Any tried out XML Publisher on a BI&W project yet? Come on over to the forum and let us know your opinion.