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Archive
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Hands on with SAP BI OnDemand
over 1 year ago | Bhargav Gandhi: AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is a cloud based offering of BI solutions. I have mentioned about this in my earlier post. Today, just to get familiar, I tried few things. I signed up for the BI OnDemand Personal Edition which is free.
I created data sets by uploading couple of spreadsheets viz. Customer_Data and Customers_Reservations.
Stable version of Chrome released today
over 1 year ago | Lalita Chandel: My View
with new bookmark synchronize features, extensions, incorporation of HTML5 features etc..
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-chrome-stable-release-welcome-mac.html
What Ratan Tata did for the Mumbai Terror attack victims
over 1 year ago | Doel Sengupta: Doel
Ratan Tata is the chairman of Indian Hotels who own the Taj Mahal Hotel Mumbai, which was the target of the terrorists on 26/11/08.
Hotel President a 5 star property also belongs to Indian Hotels.
The following is really touching.
What Ratan Tata did for the Mumbai victims.... Don't miss!!!!!!
SALUTE TO MR. RATAN TATA
A. The Tata Gesture
1. All category of employees including those who had completed even 1 day as casuals were treated on duty during the time the hotel was closed.
2. Relief and assistance to all those who were injured and killed
3. The relief and assistance was extended to all those who died at the railway station, surroundings including the "Pav- Bha ji" vendor and the pan shop owners.
4. During the time the hotel was closed, the salaries were sent by money order.
5. A psychiatric cell was established in collaboration with Tata Institute of Social Sciences to counsel those who needed such help.
6. The thoughts and anxieties going on people’s mind was constantly tracked and where needed psychological help provided.
7. Employee outreach centers were opened where all help, food, water, sanitation, first aid and counseling was provided. 1600 employees were covered by this facility.
8. Every employee was assigned to one mentor and it was that person’s responsibility to act as a "single window" clearance for any help that the person required.
9. Ratan Tata personally visited the families of all the 80 employees who in some manner – either through injury or getting killed – were affected.
10. The dependents of the employees were flown from outside Mumbai to Mumbai and taken care off in terms of ensuring mental assurance and peace. They were all accommodated in Hotel President for 3 weeks.
11. Ratan Tata himself asked the families and dependents – as to what they wanted him to do.
12. In a record time of 20 days, a new trust was created by the Tatas for the purpose of relief of employees.
13. What is unique is that even the other people, the railway employees, the police staff, the pedestrians who had nothing to do with Tatas were covered by compensation. Each one of them was provided subsistence allowance of Rs. 10K per month for all these people for 6 months.
14. A 4 year old granddaughter of a vendor got 4 bullets in her and only one was removed in the Government hospital. She was taken to Bombay hospital and several lacs were spent by the Tatas on her to fully recover her.
15. New hand carts were provided to several vendors who lost their carts.
16. Tata will take responsibility of life education of 46 children of the victims of the terror.
17. This was the most trying period in the life of the organization. Senior managers including Ratan Tata were visiting funeral to funeral over the 3 days that were most horrible.
18. The settlement for every deceased member ranged from Rs. 36 to 85 lacs [One lakh rupees tranlates to approx 2200 US $ ] in addition to the following benefits:
a. Full last salary for life for the family and dependents;
b. Complete responsibility of education of children and dependents – anywhere in the world.
c. Full Medical facility for the whole family and dependents for rest of their life.
d. All loans and advances were waived off – irrespective of the amount.
e. Counselor for life for each person
B. Epilogue
1. How was such passion created among the employees? How and why did they behave the way they did?
2. The organization is clear that it is not something that someone can take credit for. It is not some training and development that created such behaviour. If someone suggests that – everyone laughs
3. It has to do with the DNA of the organization, with the way Tata culture exists and above all with the situation that prevailed that time. The organization has always been telling that customers and guests are #1 priority
4. The hotel business was started by Jamshedji Tata when he was insulted in one of the British hotels and not allowed to stay there.
5. He created several institutions which later became icons of progress, culture and modernity. IISc is one such institute. He was told by the rulers that time that he can acquire land for IISc to the extent he could fence the same. He could afford fencing only 400 acres.
6. When the HR function hesitatingly made a very rich proposal to Ratan – he said – do you think we are doing enough?
7. The whole approach was that the organization would spend several hundred crore in re-building the property – why not spend equally on the employees who gave their life?
Hats Off to Mr. Ratan Tata..
[Source: From FB Suresh post]
World of love...
over 1 year ago | Sukhpal Bhatti: life
Love and hatred have always been two parallel streamlines of our lives. Love is when someone else's happiness becomes more important than our own. And generally, love is the reason for feeling of hatred. Love is the recognition of ourselves in others, the irrsistible desire to be desired irresistibly, the understanding by someone else about us, the comfortability of two souls, and above all -
SAP buys Sybase for $5.8 billion
over 1 year ago | Bhargav Gandhi: AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
"With this transaction, SAP will dramatically expand its addressable market by making available its market-leading solutions to hundreds of millions of mobile users, combining the world’s best business software with the world’s most powerful mobile infrastructure platform," said Bill McDermott, Co-CEO, SAP and member of the SAP Executive Board.
This is in line with what Peter Gartenberg(MD, SAP India) shared with us yesterday(refer my previous post). SAP wants to be on On-Device to increase its market share.
Refer Google/Twitter/Bing results for more information that's pouring in :).
Some of the URLs for reference.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/12/confirmed-sap-to-acquire-sybase-for-5-8-billion/
http://www.wirelessweek.com/News/Feeds/2010/05/wireless-sap-buys-sybase-for-58b/
SAP RIG event takeaways - SAP BOE XIR4 (aka Aurora), BI on-demand & SAP On-Device
over 1 year ago | Bhargav Gandhi: AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Today, I attended SAP RIG(Regional Implementation Group) customer appreciation event held here at Mumbai. I would like to share some key takeaways from it.
Aurora is here !! Aurora is SAP internal project code for SAP BOE(BusinessObjects Enterprise) XIR4 and will be released in q4 FY 2010. It is a next major release for BOE.
Following are some of the interesting additions/changes in BOE XIR4 release -
In addition, they talked about their SaaS offering BI on-demand. SAP has hosted(i.e. in cloud) all BusinessObjects BI solutions on their servers in US. All these solutions are offered on demand and follow SaaS model. They are planning to come up with BI on-demand servers in Japan as well.
BI on-demand can be integrated with other SaaS platforms like Salesforce.com. Data is extracted from Salesforce and stored in BI on-demand for reporting/dashboarding purpose.
I signed up for the Personal Edition which is free. UI looks neat. Refer the screenshot below.
I plan to try it out soon to see how it works :).
Also, SAP India MD Peter Gartenberg introduced their new focus area On-Device. Like On-Premise and On-Demand, On-Device is SAP's one of the most important focus areas. Idea is to make all SAP solutions compatible with the mobile devices like BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile, Android, etc.
Finally, the event was held at Sun-n-Sand hotel.
It is located right next to the Juhu beach :).
Allan Jardine accepted my jQuery code for his next version of the plugin
over 1 year ago | Rohan Daxini: void TechFuels()
Famous jquery plugins "DataTable" and "KeyTable" developer Allan Jardine has accepted my code (reusable function) to be included in his next version of KeyTable jQuery plugin.
Here is the mail transcript with him
________________________________
Hi Rohan,
For your information and just to keep you posted, I added this new function in KeyTable plugin to resolve multiple issues I was facing while attaching KeyTable to my DataTable. Now I just call this function as keys.fnSetPositionAndFocus(0, 0) in my javacript code to refocus on cell[0,0]. This can be used to reset and refocus on any cell of DataTable as the selection and focus were lost.
All the issues like reattachment, refocus, reselection, repeated cell selection and lost blue rectangle is resolved now due to the inclusion of this api function
this.fnSetPositionAndFocus = function(x, y) {
_iOldX = x;
_iOldY = y;
_fnRemoveFocus(_nOldFocus);
_fnSetFocus(_fnCellFromCoords(x, y));
var str = 'table tbody ' + 'tr:eq(' + y + ')>td:eq(' + x + ')';
$(str).addClass('focus');
}
Thanks,
Rohan
Yo Ti Fy
over 1 year ago | Rohan Daxini: void TechFuels()
Sat down to wander if I can have a new way to use internet. Instead of 'google'ing and 'bing'ing information I need, let someone deliver it to me based on my defined sets and preferences.
(I just wanted to negate my thought that most of us see search engines as the hub for our internet experiences, though its true uptill great extent.)
I started writting a small service for this task. Meanwhile I came across Yotify - a site which caters to specific task of tracking updates and information that pertains to our topic of interest such as an event, an item for sale on ebay, cragslist, an RSS feed, headlines etc etc.. (like a flavor of Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts but broader in scope)
On Yotify.com, users track anything they deem worth tracking by sending out ’scouts’ that send back regular reports on a particular sports headline, job listing, real estate posting, etc. The frequency of updates can be set to a daily or hourly amount, and different preferences can be selected so that when users send a scout out to monitor an item on Craigslist, for example, they can find out when the price drops to the amount they’re willing to pay. Searches are also area-specific, and users can specify the state and area where they want relevant results from.
Transcript of a chat with Rob Bouganim, Yotify's CEO
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/hands-on-and-invites-yotify-your-personal-web-secretary.ars
Rebels are important
almost 2 years ago | Surbhi Bhati: Clean Desk, Jammed drawers
There are team-mates and there are rebel team-mates. Those who do not like things the way they are, question almost everything thats put to them and have a bizzare way of working that strays almost 180 degrees (I couldnt find the degree button on my keyboard) to the line of normal work pattern.
So what do you do with them? Chuck them out? Say they are disturbing the melodious harmony of your super smooth workforce? I say think again. Do you really want to do without them?
Maybe not. Rebels are innovative, never-satisfied and always questioning the status queue. Having one of them around could be a great catalyst when you want to reduce waste, deliver just what is enough and keep energy bubbling in your team. Encourage them with appropriate means, try to align them with higher objective goals and see the effect. Who knows, they may end up giving you what you have been looking for everywhere. Or better, they may give you what you yourself coudln't imagine better.
I believe its all about people management. Or rather 'good people management'.
I could be wrong. but i still think its a nice thought ;-)
Developing the skills you need to succeed as an international leader
almost 2 years ago | Bhargav Gandhi: AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Global mind-set has three components -
- Intellectual Capital - General knowledge and capacity to learn.
- Psychological Capital - Openness to differences and capacity for change.
- Social Capital - Ability to build trusting relationships with and among people who are different from you.
- Intellectual Capital attributes - Global business savvy, Cognitive complexity, Cosmopolitan outlook
- Psychological Capital attributes - Passion for diversity, Thirst for adventure, Self assurance
- Social Capital attributes - Intercultural empathy, Interpersonal impact, Diplomacy
Couple of my favorite lines from the article -
"The world may be flat in terms of technology and interconnection. But it is still quite bumpy in the sense that employees from different part of the globe may work in very different ways."
"The fact that I know more about you does not mean that I like you or I want to work with you."
Definitely a recommended read.
