Tomorrow morning my company is hosting a breakfast session to learn about Business Objects Polestar, their new search product.
Polestar fits within the IDD layer of the Business Objects stack, and indexes information from selected universes and makes it available within a search interface.
As it is a pretty new release (December 2007), I haven't seen it in a production environment. However, it is pretty easy to use and setup - as long as you throw a powerful server at it. The product installs services for both indexing the data (because the data is indexed, hard drive space will need to be abundant with big data sets), as well as providing the interaction as shown above.
Polestar runs within the Tomcat web server only - no support for IIS as yet. It runs outside of Business Objects Enterprise (but on the same server if required), but authentication is still from BO Enterprise.
I think Polestar will fill a major niche that hasn't yet been addressed - the multitudes of users who don't want to touch a reporting tool (managers maybe?) but need numbers. This product, if implemented properly, will allow these users to quickly - quickly as in two or three clicks from the search bar - get numbers that they need.
4 comments:
Josh, you're right-on with your assessment of Polestar. BI is not one-size-fits-all and Polestar makes it simple to get some fairly interesting insights from your data. Setup is relatively simple if Tomcat is already deployed. I was able to create an "information space" for eFashion and some of my personal universes shortly after installation. Good luck with your breakfast!
Josh, nice points about Polestar, Search is definitely an area of growth in the BI market especially as now it seems that more and more BI deployments have become heavy with lots and lots of reports – possibly a victim of their own success!
Polestar will help users easily find information, quicker and more efficiently.
One other thing to think about is harnessing the collective insight of your user base to drive users to relevant information quicker and easier.
Antivia Desktop from Australian based software company Antivia allows users to rate information delivered to them as they would music in iTunes or books at Amazon.com.
It then uses this information to enable uses across the organisation to instantly see which reports might be most relevant to them and their role.
It also delivers community based capabilities around users polls and collaboration.
They also plan to incorporate Polestar into their solution over the coming year.
Josh, I see that the SAP Help Portal has docs for Polestar XI 3.1 but I don't see a download. Is the updated product available?
Hi Dallas,
According to @businessobjects (Twitter acct), Polestar 3.1 should have been released last week.
I'm still searching for it! :)
- Josh
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