BO Admin responsibilities?

[vani65]

Hi All,
As we have a proposal for a separate Business Objects Administrator to look after all BO Admin stuff. Our manager wants to know what exactly BO Admin’s Daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly responsibilities?.
Any discussion or advice in this regard will be highly appreciated

 

[blom0344]

Unless you are running a HUGE BO shop with thousands of users I cannot see a full-time administrator in an environment that is stable and running.

I would say that it depends on whether you need to 'tune' a lot for your user population. Basic tasks for any admin would be to ensure user registration (helpdesk) and keeping security in check (who can access what) This can be extremely time-consuming depending on your needs (retail, banking .......) Should the administrator communicate performance issues with the DBA's? Etc,Etc......

To give more usefull advice we would need to know more about these things at your side. (Personally just administrating BO seems a very tedious job to me)

T. Blom
Information analyst
tbl@shimano-eu.com

 

[vani65]

Thanks for your prompt reply-- blom ,
Yes! I can agree with you and also suggested the same to my management. Currently we are having 800 plus user (most of them are ZABO) in our deployment, most of these so-called BO Administration look after by myself. As per my job is concern, I’m responsible for universe design and maintenance along with Supervisor. In one way jack of all trades…….., it is really become burden to manage that number of users and their resources. So our management thinking for full time BO Admin position. They want to know what duties can assign to BO Admin. I already prepare a checklist as follows; if you guys give some more input that will be grate.

1) Installing and upgrading BO server
2) Monitoring DB services (database connectivity)
3) Monitoring BO server running with optimal performance
4) All Webi system administrations like user activities/ sessions, enable/ disable users and modules (if required)
5) Configuring all system (Webi) modules.
6) Troubleshooting

But the management wants to the list in break down fashion like :
· Daily duties
· Weekly duties
· Fortnightly duties
· Monthly duties
Hi Blom, that’s the reason I approached you guys for suggestion, Can you please advise me What else duties we can assign to so called BO Admin --, I my opinion some General supervisor stuff like Repository maintenance etc. can be assigned ? what do you say…?

 

[nimmy99]

Linking and unlinking the resources.
Deleting the resources (universe, document) from the repository
monitoring the licenses
cleaning the repositories like orphaned connection, universes, documents
password reset
Tech support

 

[blom0344]

vani,

Seems like your management comes straight from Dilbert.
Administration on BO is not comparable with a classic DBA job, where I can imagine you can classify duties more or less on the periodic scale that they demand.

A DBA will have some routines for reorganizing tables, creating daily backups , running statistics etc. A BO administrator is much more dependant on fluctuating user-demands, which basically means there will days having you running around like mad and other days being very quiet I imagine.
Therefore creating a one-man job may not be that smart.

Most BO administration tasks are very , uh , much administrational (is that a word?), so could very well be done with a small team of say, designers, that have enough background to oversee the landscape and replace each other in that respect.

And lets be honest, it is not much of an challenge performing admin tasks 8 hours a day, is it......?


T. Blom
Information analyst
tbl@shimano-eu.com

 

[nimmy99]

From my view, it's not a challenging job. Sometimes they will have 8 hours task. Not always. So in my company ask the admin to do some other small projects like SDK, testing, website development, ...

 

[vani65]

Hi Guys,
I was successfully in convincing my management team about the BO Administrator roll which we discussed earlier, so the outcome ---- no new BO Admin..J . But still want to know about the duties of a person dealing with Supervisor, Designer and BO technical support. Now I modified my checklist as follows:
If any thing to add or delete – please suggest me

Daily duties:
· All BO users logins and Security checks (Who is accessing what) verification
· Monitoring BO server including Test (WMNTBO and WMNTBO1 )running with optimal performance
· Monitoring all DB services
· Testing the availability of all Universe connections to respective Databases
· Verifying site properties/user activities/ BO module activities from Web intelligence Console
· Monitoring day to day scheduled jobs on Broadcast Agent (BCA)
· Attending regular ITs Calls for Business Objects
· Troubleshooting if any issues with Reports (Technical support to Users)
Weekly:
· Regular BO repository Maintenance like Cleaning Orphaned Connection/Universe/Documents
· Scan / Repair and Compact to all repository errors and Domain testing
Fortnightly
· Running Integrity Checks on all Universe (including Test once) to ensure through parsing (Syntax/Sematic Checking)
· Discuss performance issues with DBA
Monthly:
· Monitoring BO Licences and Transfer issues
Occasionally:
· New Univerese development / modification
· Data maping to new tables in the universes (if and when required)
· BO resoure allocation like linking universe / Documents to Users and User Groups (if and when required)
Rarely:
· Installation and upgrading BO server with new version of software (Business Objects)
· Meeting with BO users to discuss supporting issues
· End User training