I apologize if this is off topic but I felt that this was something was worth sharing with everyone.

So this weekend I decided to buy a Solid State Drive (Corsair F115) as I was interested in speeding up my system.

The only problem here was that Solid State Drives are much smaller than the traditional hard drive.  Thus the task was to migrate only the OS partition to the Solid State Drive.  My system consisted of a C: partition, which housed the Operating System and applications that I used often. It also consisted of a D: partition where all the data and applications that were executed not so often resided.

Although some people would tell you to do a fresh install with the new drive, a fresh install is not an option for me, as I have a ton of applications installed and a lot of tweaks and customization done on my system that I do not want to spend weeks doing again.

I hope that everyone has had a great start to 2011!
2010 was a huge year but 2011 looks to be even bigger!

I’m very pleased to announce that the Xcelsius Cookbook, which Xavier Hacking and I have been working very hard on, is scheduled to be released in it’s final format on May 2011.

The book will be structured like a cookbook where we will go through step by step on accomplishing different tasks (recipes) in Xcelsius.

In addition we will be showcasing some of the more popular 3rd party addons, provide best practices for development, as well as provide some real life dashboard examples built using recipes learned from the cookbook.

The book is currently available as RAW (Read as we write) format since it is currently under development, so feel free to check it out at the Packt Publishing website for more information.  In addition, since SAP is re-branding Xcelsius yet again, the book name will most likely change to SAP Business Objects Dashboards Cookbook.  Stay Tuned for updates!

Thanks for all your support!

I look forward to seeing everyone at Vancouver’s very first local SAP Inside Track Wednesday Sept 15, 2010!

I’ve been given the great opportunity to represent Xcelsius Gurus Network and present on SAP Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius).

I’ll be presenting the following topics and have a thorough Questions and Answer period.

• Why are dashboards used and what are the benefits?
• Dashboard Design and Best Practices
• Dashboard Connectivity – Enterprise and Non Enterprise
• Xcelsius best practices with the designer and internal spreadsheet
• Xcelsius Tips and Tricks
• Xcelsius resources

For more information on the event please visit the event WIKI at

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/events/SAP+Inside+Track+Vancouver+2010

In my previous article I gave an overview of the Microcharts plug-in for Xcelsius and a quick example of creating a Microcharts Datatable. In addition, I explained how to replicate the same example in Xcelsius using workarounds that would make development much more timely and harder to maintain.

In this article I would like to talk about some important features that Inovista Microcharts has that Xcelsius cannot reproduce. A very important table component that Xcelsius lacks is the ability to expand and contract your rows like a tree. Inovista has a component called a “Microchart Tree Grid” that allows a user to expand and contract rows so that users can group their rows accordingly. This is extremely important if we don’t want to clutter a table view with too many rows.

This is a warning to all consultants and anyone who has professional contact with Frederick Carter.

I’ve worked with many clients in the BI and BOBJ industry and unfortunately this is the first customer that I have provided services for who ran away without paying. Apparently Frederick needed some work accomplished in a short period of time and I was generous enough to complete a week’s worth of Xcelsius work without even taking a deposit.

Luckily, towards the end of a week’s work, I accidentally heard one of his conversations with his accomplice “Dianne Sawyer” saying that he was going to stiff me and not pay. In addition, he said that “The client he was trying to score the contract with thinks that all the Xcelsius work was done by him, and that he could learn how to be an Xcelsius and Business Objects expert in 1 week”. I called him up on this and he kept making excuses that he was having cash flow problems. He said that he would promise to pay if I would do a few more hours of work for him so that he could score a contract with Fannie Mae. So, out of sympathy I completed a few hours of work for him and after the work was completed, he started ignoring my emails and phone calls regarding payment.

After he found out he got kicked out of the linked in group “Xcelsius Gurus” since he ripped off another Xcelsius Consultant “Kalyan Verma”, he started begging me to get him back into the group and offered to pay off his debt in payments. I was nice enough to agree and he paid an initial payment of $200. However a week later he purposely closed his account on paypal and the $200 payment got reversed.

After that he has ignored all calls and emails.

I hope this posting will expose and help prevent Frederick Carter from ripping off anymore consultants and businesses since we all work hard for our living. For those who are interested, I have all the chat logs and emails sent back and forth between us to prove everything that happened.

Here is a link to his linked-in profile

http://www.linkedin.com/in/frederickcarter

His Corporation is Pathway Technologies Inc.
His Accomplice is Dianne Sawyer