FIRE 2008

Presentations

Presentations from FIRE 2008 are now being posted. Please check back as more presentations will be posted soon!

In addition to the presentations listed below, Noreen and Cesare jointly presented the always well received 'FOCWizards' workshop.

fire bullet FOCWizards (.pdf)

Ernest Brown - Keynote Speaker

Ernest Brown has worked for Information Builders for over 20 years, primarily in post sales services groups. He joined the company in 1987 as a Professional Services consultant in the Atlanta office. Ernest began is career by assisting customers with their information delivery applications. He found his ‘calling’ when he was given the opportunities for his well known, enthusiastically delivered Instructor Led Training sessions.

In 1996, Ernest joined the Customer Education department. He served in a variety of roles ranging from course development to managing the sales and instructional delivery teams. In 2008, Ernest was offered the opportunity to lead efforts to help grow Information Builders Premium Support business. He currently serves as the Premium Sales Support Director for North America.

Noreen Redden

Noreen Redden is a FOCWizard in the Advanced Technical Support division. Working with FOCUS for more than 25 years, she has been an application developer, teacher, customer support representative, and general question answerer.

fire bullet FOCUS Tips and Techniques

If you've ever thought,"It's a shame that FOCUS can't do that," then attend this presentation where we'll show you how FOCUS "can" do that. There will also be tips and techniques applicable both to FOCUS and WEBFOCUS. Presenters will show GUI and code, mostly for reporting.

fire bullet FOCUS Internals Part 1 (.pdf)

This presentation looks at what FOCUS is doing under the covers when a TABLE is executed in FOCUS on any platform, or through WebFOCUS. Update for release 7.6.x.

fire bullet FOCUS Internals Part 2 (.pdf)

Update for release 7.6.x. Learn how prefixes work and whether they can be referenced in SUBTOTAL or SUMMARIZE lines. Is it better to do a RETYPE or reissue the request? Once data has been retrieved for a report request, the next step is to use that invoked output data.

fire bullet Not your Mother's FOCUS (.pdf)

Noreen shares her picks for 'Best New Features' in WebFOCUS.

Cesare Petrizio

Cesare Petrizio is with Information Builders' Customer Support Services department and is based in the Atlanta office. Cesare joined the firm in 1988 as a consultant in the Dallas office. He was the company's education manager for three years and has presented at numerous TOPGUN and FUSE meetings.

fire bullet Join and All its Flavors (.pdf)

JOINS!

fire bullet Debugging Techniques

What do you do when a request doesn't behave the way you expect, when the data returned looks incorrect, or when the report produces FOC error messages? Updated this year, this session reviews the tools that you can use to see what FOCUS is doing under the covers and gives you the ability to correct errors or find a work-around.

fire bullet FOCUS to SQL Demystified

Are you getting the most out of your SQL? This session will show how various phrases in a TABLE request are passed to the SQL engine. Previous knowledge of SQL is helpful, but not required. You will learn how to turn on traces to view the translated SQL and discuss what to look for in the translated SQL. Other topics discussed: simple optimization and joining of tables.

Renee Teatro

Renee Teatro joined Information Builders' Customer Support Services in 1992 and is currently a WebFOCUS Technical Support Supervisor. She holds a B.A. in Computer Science from New York University (NYU) along with several technical certificates in a variety of areas from NYU and Columbia University. In addition, Renee was an instructor at Columbia University's Continuing Education Computer Technology (CTA) program, where she introduced students to Web-based user-interface development through HTML and JavaScript, along with the PL/SQL language and development tools.

fire bullet Relational Efficiencies Part 1 (.pdf)

fire bullet Relational Efficiencies Part 2 (.pdf)

Most of us use some relational tables in our reporting...DB2, SQLDS, Oracle. These tables are often large, and the code choices made by the application developer means the difference between an efficient report and one that times out the server. What are the choices for efficient JOINs and report requests? What are the implications of various SETS? What DEFINEs will be passed to the DBMS engine and which ones must be done by FOCUS? Join an exploration of the wonderful world of relationships and relationals.

Brian Carter

Brian Carter is a Technical Director with over ten years of marketing and product management experience. Brian is currently a member of the Strategic Product Management group at Information Builders and manages key areas of the WebFOCUS product such as Office integration, electronic publishing, and more. Brian also takes great pleasure in traveling and presenting to the exceptional customer base of Information Builders.

fire bullet Integration with Excel

This presentation will demonstrate how existing Excel Applications can be enabled via WebFOCUS. If you or someone in your organization is spending time cutting and pasting data into highly macro-driven and graphical Excel Spreadsheets, their efforts can now be fully automated and scheduled. They can also be intelligently busted to the appropriate individual where each person only gets the Excel Spreadsheet that contains his/her data.

fire bullet Publishing Information with WebFOCUS

All companies have a need to create comprehensive, boardroom quality documents that deliver the overall state of the business. Annual or even monthly reports must contain scores of individual reports and graphs all compiled into a single distributable document. Creating these types of reports can be very difficult and time-consuming, presenting a major challenge to those responsible for this task. WebFOCUS can easily meet this challenge and help streamline the process of creating these large scale reports. The PDF Layout Painter has added many new features in the latest release allowing the delivery of advanced and stylish multi-page layouts. This session will show how you can combine, coordinate, and publish your reports with WebFOCUS!

fire bullet What’s New in WebFOCUS (short version)

WebFOCUS New Feature Update with an emphasis on WebFOCUS FLEX Enable and Active Technologies! The presentation will show you first hand why you should be using WebFOCUS FLEX Enable, which gives developers and analysts the ability to easily deliver rich Internet applications for business intelligence. In addition, we’ll show you the latest features such as Active Dashboard, the first portable BI platform, and it’s amazing capability. A brief demonstration and flash card on WebFOCUS Mobile, InfoAssist, Google Maps, Magnify, and Quick Data will also be shown. You don’t want to miss this!

Anthony Grice

Anthony Grice has been a Focus User for 10 years. (Mainframe focus for 8 years). He uses Dev Studio 7.6.2 (GUI interface and Text editor) for building reports. He has been employed with A&T for over 24 years; 13 Years in the Data Center as an Analyst and as a Vax Systems Manager and 11 Years in the Comptroller’s Office as Director of Systems Development.

fire bullet Building Financial Statements Using WebFocus (.pdf)

This session will describe the development of a WebFocus report that will produce a Financial Statement from Banner Finance. This report will replace a labor intensive process that can produce errors during the data gathering phase. Sample output from the manual process, as well as the WebFocus report will be shown. This report is currently being used by the Auxiliary Services unit in their monthly financial meetings.

Bob Zinn

Bob Zinn has over 25 years experience with FOCUS and WebFOCUS. He has an extensive IT background including application management, strategic planning, and design and development of production and ad hoc reporting environments including custom reporting portals for large scale enterprise. Bob's background includes eight years with Information Builder's as well as an extensive history as a FOCUS/WebFOCUS instructor and presenter.

fire bullet Calculations - Everything You Wanted To Know About Define And Compute

In the WebFOCUS world calculations are created with a lot of point-and-click. Sometimes you need to dig into the code to make sense out of what it's doing. The presentation will discuss the mechanics of the COMPUTE and DEFINE language and explain the need for each. We will look at the language to understand how it works and why it does what it does.

fire bullet StyleSheet Exposed

WebFOCUS report procedures contain elements that identify the report components for formatting. These components are collectively referenced as the StyleSheet. This presentation will discuss the basic methods, procedures, and techniques of the StyleSheet with emphasis on the elements of style for printed reports.

Harry Cleveland

Harry M Cleveland has more than 25 years of FOCUS and 10 years of WebFOCUS experience. For the last 15 years, he has been the FOCUS/WebFOCUS administrator at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Other than playing Super Mario, writing utilities using Dialogue Manager is his second favorite pastime.

fire bullet Luigi Technique II - The Bonus Level (.pdf)

How often have you heard users say: "I have a list of IDs and want to run a report for students who are only on my list."

Translation: "I can't remember how to upload a 'finder set' containing student IDs to the mainframe can you do it for me?"

Well, poor, tired ol' Luigi saves the day with a combination of Dialogue Manager, inline html, and Table/Modify commands. This technique will demonstrate an unusual approach that empowers WebFOCUS users to upload their own finder sets to drive reporting.

David Denst

Dave Denst has been in the data processing field for over 30 years and with Information Builders for the past 15. He is a customer education specialist involved with customer training, instructor training, course development, specialized presentations, and other education roles.

fire bullet Basic Report Painter (.pdf)

Developer Studio is a powerful graphical tool for developing Managed Reporting and stand-alone reporting applications. This education session introduces you to Report Painter, which is one of the GUI tools in Developer Studio for creating reports. Among the topics covered will be displaying columns, filtering rows, creating virtual fields, and styling the report.

fire bullet You Can Do it Visually! (.pdf)

The WebFOCUS command language is very flexible and is only limited by the imagination of its users to create complex reports. Developer Studio has a suite of powerful graphical tools to solve business information needs visually. This presentation shows how Developer Studio’s graphical interfaces can satisfy a complex report request requiring many different reporting skills needed to produce the desired results.