CA PPM 14.2 & Jaspersoft | Rego PPM Hangouts On Air

Our Google Hangout, “Moving to CA PPM 14.2 and the Jaspersoft Integration,” included a live Q&A with Jason Soulier, Vipin Chouhan, Josh Leone, Doug Greer, and Atul Kunkulol. Get your questions answered by listening to the audio, watching the recorded Rego Hangout On Air from Rego’s YouTube Channel, or scrolling through the full-text below.

Moving to CA PPM 14.2 and Jaspersoft | Video

Moving to CA PPM 14.2 and Jaspersoft | Transcript

Jason Soulier

Well, hello and welcome everyone to Rego Consulting’s first Hangout on Google Live on air. My name is Jason Soulier. I’m VP of Business Development and Marketing at Rego Consulting. We’re certainly glad that you’ve joined us. Today we’re going to be presenting something different, a new way for the Clarity community to learn together online. Our topic today is upgrading to Clarity 14.2, CA PPM 14.2, highlighting especially the point we’re all interested in: Jaspersoft.

I have with me today four Clarity experts from Rego Consulting, expert in the product and upgrading and its features and how to get the most value out of CA PPM. So first of all, none of us, chiefly me, are TV stars, so I hope you’ll be patient with us. None of us are headed for panelists on Meet the Press, at least not yet. But we’ll do our best to have a coherent, educational, and fun conversation. In fact, being informal today is a purposeful objective. We feel like the usual webinars and other kinds of online presentations just aren’t fun anymore.

So we’re trying something new. One of the things about being informal is we can all participate with questions and help guide the conversation. So I hope that you can see, on the page that you’re on, your ability to submit questions. And I hope that you will submit questions throughout the broadcast.

Part of this is Rego’s focus on wanting to be the source of learning, in the learning community of CA PPM. We encourage you to look at regoconsulting.com; our new blogs are coming online.  We’ll have more of these events as well.

Follow up on social media, and of course May 3-6 will be our in-person regoUniversity, where we’ll have full day classes in Jaspersoft and be talking about 14.2 and upgrading to it in more detail, at our in-person event, May 3-6, in Tampa Florida. More details at RegoUniversity.com. And of course, if you ever need help with upgrading, at Rego, the largest Clarity services company in the world, it would be our honor to help you with your coming upgrade.

With that, we’ll turn the time and open the discussion on Clarity 14.2 and moving to Jaspersoft. Thanks again, everyone, for being here.

Let’s begin with a question to Josh Leone to get it started. So Josh, why don’t you start our discussion. Give us a quick overview of what’s new in 14.2 and some of the things that maybe you’re excited to see in it. Josh, what do you think?

Josh Leone (3:46)

Thanks, Jason. 14.2, 14 in general, is a pretty big release for CA. Probably about a year’s worth of work went into that. Some of the cool things that we’ll talk about today around Jaspersoft, Data Warehouse, those are the real marquee features. But there’s plenty of other cool things that came into it that aren’t those.

There are major changes to portfolios to take away the restrictions for the amount of investment limitations. That’s a big feature. Some changes to the MSP Driver, that have long been wanted for performance, to get that up to current Microsoft standards. There’s a really good chance that going to help a lot of our MSP customers out there. Couple that with multiple hundreds of bugs fixed by the Sustained Engineering Department, customer facing bugs . . . long. Some bugs that have been out there for multiple years. So it’s a great stability release as well.

There’s some under-the-hood stuff that was a good, important change. IE 11 support came in. It’s done via a compatibility mode kind of thing. So it wasn’t that the whole product had to be redesigned for IE 11. They just forced IE 10 under the hood. That’s going to come in real handy for customers requiring that for a browser. So a lot of little things like that outside of the big marquee features came in. I think they’ll be really compelling for customers to upgrade.

Jason Soulier (5:08)

That’s perfect, Josh. A lot of good things. And again, we encourage our community to submit questions in the Q&A and guide the conversation. So Josh, obviously one of the big things you mentioned–you mentioned a lot of invaluable things like the MSP Integration and Data Warehouse–but of course the big thing we’re all interested in right now is Jaspersoft. So how do you feel about Jaspersoft as a new reporting technology?

Josh Leone (5:35)

For me, Jaspersoft was a big move. I’ve been with this product for almost fifteen years now. Business Objects was a very, very difficult product to use and support. Jaspersoft is going to revolutionize that. You’ll have a product that’s lightweight, similar in technology to Clarity

[Business Objects]. It’s going to be easy to use. They’re very interested in working with CA to continue to enhance their product to make it better for Clarity. And it comes with all the features that the guys here will talk about. So just from a usability and features standpoint, it was a huge, huge move.

Jason Soulier (6:14)

Awesome. Right. Well let’s get Doug Greer on. Doug’s been researching Jaspersoft and has spent a lot of time on it. Doug, what’s included in the Jaspersoft suite of tools?

Doug Greer (6:28)

There’s a few things. One is you have Jaspersoft Studio Reports, and that’s going to be similar to Crystal Reports. So things today you might build in Crystal, you’d build as a Studio Report: very powerful, pixel perfect. You can do a lot with the Studio Reports.

The second thing you have is ad hoc reporting, and that’s very drag and drop. You don’t have to be a technical expert to do that, very easy to use.

Another component of that is the Dashboard. So we are going to have the dashboarding capability.

And then another thing is Domains. You may not be familiar with what’s in Business Objects today, but in today’s Business Objects, you have Webi reports, which are ad hoc, and underneath that, at the data source, you have Universes, and that’s being replaced by the Jaspersoft ad hoc, and then Domains are the underlying source for that.  And then what you build in Xcelcius today as Dashboards, Jaspersoft has that capability as well. So everything, every main product that was being used in Business Objects will have a replacement now in Jaspersoft.

Jason Soulier (7:47)

But if I understand correctly, Business Objects is still part of 14.2. We don’t have to completely switch over right now. Is that true?

Doug Greer (7:56)

That’s right. So right now they’re going to be side-by-side, and this is the only major release where that is the case. Next major release, which I believe will be some time next year, is going to only support Jaspersoft. So if you upgrade to 14.2, you can keep using your Business Objects reports as is.

Jason Soulier (8:19)

So thinking in comparison with Business Objects, you talked about how Jaspersoft can do the same things as Business Objects does today. What are new things in Jaspersoft that we haven’t been able to do in the past?

Doug Greer (8:36)

There’s a few new things. One, with the ad hoc reporting, it’s a lot easier to use. It’s integrated right inside Clarity. So before you actually had to go to a separate web address, login with separate credentials, in order to build ad hoc reports. Now it’s right inside Clarity. You click on one link called Advanced Reporting, and it brings up the tool. So it’s pretty easy to use, and I think that’s a big advantage, and the Studio Reports are more powerful I’ve found.  Because Jaspersoft has tried to go very open source, on the back end it’s very open. Everything is in XML. There’s a lot of power behind that, a lot of customizability.

Jason Soulier (8:26)

Alright. Sounds terrific. I think that’s pretty good. I’m looking at other questions. Atul, any thoughts from you about some of the benefits of Jaspersoft, and what kinds of things are available out-of-the-box, or any other thoughts from you, Atul, on moving to Jaspersoft?

Atul Kunkulol (9:52)

First of all, I’ve got to say, I’m really excited about Jaspersoft. The first thing, the most important thing is it’s pixel perfect out-of-the-box. You can get much more clear reports that what you had before.

As Doug mentioned, Jaspersoft is open source, so there’s a huge Jaspersoft library, and behind the scenes you can not only connect with Clarity, but you can also connect with other data sources and web services. So I can even have a Dashboard with just Clarity data, with Jira, or Salesforce, or SharePoint data and maybe associate from Bing or Google. So I can have a one-spot shop on Jaspersoft.

And again ad hoc reports bring in easier use for the customers, where a functional user or a business user doesn’t need really technical knowledge to create reports, so that’s a huge plus. You don’t need to know the files to do stuff like that.

Those are the things which I find Jaspersoft is much more. And currently Jaspersoft is . . . CA is supporting Version 5.6 of Jaspersoft. But already the market Version 6 is out, which actually has data visualization tools, and that is much better in terms of creating dashboards, as well as visualizations of the data off Clarity. So I think it’s a great step forward, and I think the next version is going to bring much more ability to creating reports and dashboards.

Jason Soulier (12:00)

So on that ease of reports, talk to me about the ability to potentially email reports or automate some of that process, Atul.

Atul Kunkulol (12:10)

That’s a great question. First, and the most common thing everybody does, is they want to run the report. But as soon as they see it, they want to share it. And there are multiple ways to share reports. One is by exporting. Exporting—you can export the data into multiple formats, more than what we could do in Business Objects: Excel, Word, Powerpoint, as well as Open Office Documents, PDF, CSV, rich text . .  . you ask it, and they have it. On top of that, you can email, which you could do before. The only problem before we had, was you used to send a link to the user, and they had to have Clarity access to see the report. In this case, we can actually send them an attachment. So we’re in the process of testing if you can send attachments to non-Clarity users, and they should be able to see the report. This would be a huge plus. That way you can have business users looking at your status reports.

Jason Soulier (13:20)

Perfect. Doug, any comments from you about the ease of the reporting feature, and how it might help us to get more people involved in the benefits of Clarity, of CA PPM?

Doug Greer (13:32)

Definitely. With Clarity over the years, there’s been sometimes a bit of a hole, as far as reporting goes, and a lot of that’s because folks have a lot of custom fields. So you can provide canned reports all day, but if it doesn’t have your custom fields, it may not be as meaningful to you. Well the great thing with this Jaspersoft move and the Data Warehouse especially, is that CA has built in the functionality where your custom fields will also be available. So nothing needs to be done on your end. You can go into Jaspersoft and create an ad hoc report and all of your custom fields are right there. And I know a lot of organizations spend a lot of money building reports. The support team inside their organization spends a lot of time on that, and this will give the power out to their users, so they can get access to their data instantaneously. There’s no delay, and they can build the report exactly how they want it.

Jason Soulier (14:43)

I’ll let you guys have a conversation about what’s new with the Data Warehouse, more specifically. You mentioned that. I don’t know if you or Atul or Josh want to talk about that.

Atul Kunkulol (14:58)

Yeah. I can get started with the Data Warehouse. There is this new database. Before—in the past—we had Datamart, which was a few different tables where you had summarized information in the data warehouse. It was limited, and a lot of times the users actually had to go to their transactions tables to get information or summarize, and that was a burden on Clarity.

With this release, CA has separated the reporting capability by providing Data Warehouse, which can actually sit in a separate database. The advantage of that, is if someone is running a huge report, it doesn’t cause issues with the people who are actually using Clarity. So that is a great plus. And there are about (I haven’t counted the numbers), but there are probably 100+ measures, like total cost, total hours, something that you want every day in your reports to show up, and you don’t have to do a lot of work. It’s all labeled, and as long as you run a job behind the scenes, it should show the latest and greatest numbers. What do you think, guys?

Josh Leone (16:28)

I think it’s going to be a good move. We need to . . . it’s long been needed to get reporting out of the transactional database, so I think the future with this warehouse, as it continues to grow, is going to be huge.

Jason Soulier (16:42)

So I have some questions that have come in from our viewing community. Thank you to everyone for joining the conversation. So let me give a few questions from our community, if I could.

Does Jaspersoft have a structured data model similar to a Universe? We may have covered that already, but any follow up comments to that question?

Doug Greer (17:05)

Yeah, I can answer that. So you have the equivalent of a Universe. A Universe would be in Business Objects. Jaspersoft has something called a Domain. It’s a metadata layer on top of your data source. The data source for the Jaspersoft domain is the new Data Warehouse, and these Domains, like a Universe does for Business Objects, are going to simplify the data model, so the end user, when they’re building ad hoc reports, they’ll see a folder that says Projects, and in that they’ll have all their project level fields and inside of that, they’ll have a folder for tasks, with all their task level fields, so it makes it very easy to find the fields you want. You don’t have to go hunting around in the database.

Jason Soulier (17:53)

Good. Any other answers to that question?

Atul Kunkulol (17:57)

I can. If you have custom objects which were created, they can also be available as part of Data Warehouse. If you have custom attributes, as Doug mentioned, you can have those available in the Data Warehouse. What you need is just to go into the administration section and check a box and say, “I want this available in Data Warehouse.” So those features really add up.

Now, in terms of . . . although there are eight domains available, there could be challenges where you want information from multiple domains on the same report, and that could be a challenge because on ad hoc reports, you can only select one domain at a time. And that’s where I think the ability to create custom domains could help.

Jason Soulier (18:55)

Okay. Another question is, “I’m concerned about the current CSP reports. Are those reports being rewritten in Jaspersoft?”

Josh Leone (19:08)

Yeah. I can answer that. So the plan is absolutely, for all of the reports that existed in Business Objects that were released by CA will be written for Jaspersoft, so that is definitely CA’s plan.

Jason Soulier (19:20)

Great. Another question. “What report scheduling capabilities does Jaspersoft offer? Does it allow you to drop reports to a file location?”

Doug Greer (19:40)

Yeah, I’ve seen it, at least in Version 6, which I’ve seen, you can definitely drop it into a file location. Atul, have you seen it in Version 5.6.1? Is that confirmed that it’s there?

Atul Kunkulol (19:51)

I haven’t tried it, but when I was back at CA World, I did see it was possible to save it on a folder as well as email it. So I don’t see it being a challenge, but again, we haven’t tested it ourselves yet.

Jason Soulier (20:08)

Last question right now, that’s open in the community, “When will CA support Jaspersoft Version 6? Is that in the works?”

Josh Leone (20:22)

I can tell you that CA is working on it. That’s about as much as we can give.

Jason Soulier (20:32)

Alright, so that sounds like a question that might be good to pass on to CA and submit out. I really appreciate the questions from the community. Thank you for participating. Continue to send those in, and if we’re not answering them right away, we will get to them in the conversation. Those are the questions from the community so far.

Doug Greer (21:00)

I can make a comment on the Jaspersoft direction overall. I met with some of the folks from Jaspersoft at a conference a couple weeks ago, and I can tell you that long term they’re committed to be the most embeddable product out there, that’s their space. That’s where they want to focus is being able to embed their product inside of other tools, and because of that, it makes a great companion to Clarity, and being that Jaspersoft is a smaller organization than SAP, which owns Business Objects, I think they’re also going to be able to work more with the folks at CA, so that if there is functionality missing, I could see the Jaspersoft folks being a little more flexible and even building some functionality specifically for CA because we as a community of Clarity uses are going to be a big customer base for Jaspersoft.

Jason Soulier (22:15)

Perfect. So how much of a learning curve do you see for new users who are transferring to Jaspersoft? What types of CBT training, documentation, user groups, and forums will be in place to provide knowledge and resources to users making the switch?

So before we take this question, just a reminder. Come on down to regoUniversity May 3-6. We have many full-day Jaspersoft classes among other things, and check out our blogs.

Does anyone have a comment on the learning curve and making this switch? How hard is it going to be for us as a community?

Atul Kunkulol (23:05)

I can comment on the learning curve. We have known Clarity, and we have worked on Clarity since ages, and switching to a new reporting wasn’t a challenge at all. We started out with trying to understand how the product worked and how it was integrated with Clarity.

There are several resources available to learn. Jaspersoft themselves have an online learning portal, so that is quite a bit of content over there. Good ol’ YouTube has a lot of content available. You can sign up on LinkedIn groups, and that could give you more tips and tricks on creating reports, and as Jason, as you said, Rego is always available to help out, and regoUniversity is a great place to go.

Vipin Chouhan (24:01)

Just one comment I would like to make, the Data Warehouse, in terms of learning, as well as in terms of development of SQLs that is going to be definitely easier because of the warehouse – it includes the star schema, combination of dimensions and fact tables. That really helps. That makes life easier. Not just the developers but system as well because it improves system (report SQLs) performance a lot. And learning that, if you are already aware of the Clarity, picking up the Warehouse table is not at all going to be difficult. It’s very easy, and less tables, comparatively. So that’s faster to learn.

Josh Leone (24:48)

Vipin, how is it to install? Better to install? Easier to install than BO was?

Vipin Chouhan (24:55)

Well, installation, yes definitely. It was new since the first time, so we had to definitely import the schema. It’s a given schema, will have to prepare our environment either going for new database or can go in same database with the new schema. And then will have to import the provided schema. After that, definitely some configuration has to be done on the Clarity side where you have to create a link and do some NSA configuration. So initially that was tricky, but once you’re done it’s not a big deal. So initially, yes would say it was a little tricky, but not a huge configuration, it was a minor configuration will have to do.

Atul Kunkulol (25:53)

Do you need a lot of hardware or software, in addition to what you had back in 13.3 or other versions?

Vipin Chouhan (25:57)

Well, in terms of hardware and software, if you’re already using the system and you’re going to upgrade, not much changes you will have to do in system. It’s just that the call you have to make, where you want to keep warehouse, either going with the same database server or going with the new server. I have seen the cases where people prefer to keep the same database, it’s just a new schema has to be created, so no hardware changes or software requirements for the warehouse.

Jason Soulier (26:33)

Vipin, I’m glad you joined the conversation. Any other thoughts on upgrading to 14.2? Generally you’ve already led a number of upgrades to 14.2. Any heads up for our community out there?

Vipin Chouhan (26:47)

Well, if you are already on some version of Clarity, so definitely, the one key thing I would say or would identify is you will have to figure out what will be your upgrade path, and that is definitely depends on what version you’re currently on and how you can make to Clarity 14.2. So say if you’re already on vanilla (base) version of 13.3 or any other base version till v12, in that case you can straight away upgrade to 14.2, but if you have a applied some fix pack already on your machine, in that case you will have to ensure to upgrading to the latest version of fix pack available. So if you’re on 13.3.x.x, you should upgrade to either FP 11 or FP 12, and then you should try upgrading to 14.2. So that is one thing I would recommend. You should find out the right upgrade path.

Josh Leone (27:49)

Yeah. And I would add to that, so 14.2 includes all of the defects fixed up from 13.3, fix 7. So if you’re on one of those later versions: 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12, those bug fixes aren’t yet in 14.2. They’ll come in the first patch. So it’s an important point for those customers already in the latest versions after 13.3, and if you went to 14.2, you’d lose those fixes, so you wait until the first patch, and then they get rolled in.

Jason Soulier (28:27)

Okay. We have a lot of questions coming in. Go ahead, Doug. Jump in.

Doug Greer (28:30)

Yeah, just on the ease of install, having done a number of Business Objects installs in the past, and now I’ve done a few Jaspersoft installs. I’d say far and away the Jaspersoft install was easier, especially on Linux, Unix, and Solaris. With Business Objects, we had a number of clients that have had to just switch off of Linux and go to a Windows server because of the instability. With Jaspersoft, I’ve done a few on Linux and Unix, and every time it’s just been perfect, very easy to do.

Vipin Chouhan (29:15)

Definitely. Because Business Objects was kind of painful to get it installed and then maintainability of it. It’s pretty easy the Jaspersoft. It makes life easy.

Jason Soulier (29:23)

Great discussion. Here’s a question from our community. “We currently use Business Analytics. Will reports be rewritten in Jaspersoft?”

Josh Leone (29:36)

Yeah, that’s a question we don’t have an answer to, and they’re going to want to chat with CA about that because that was a very one-off specific services product, if I recall.

Jason Soulier (29:48)

Okay. How about . . . “Can you talk about the mobile capabilities of Jaspersoft via the Apple Android app?”

Josh Leone (29:57)

So, in general the Jasper apps exit, but there’s no authentication yet for CA to be able to communicate with them. That’s something they’re going to look at putting in. So the reporting capability is there, and now that the product is out the door, CA is going to look to add full mobile support. Has anyone, Doug, you have an android, have you tried outside of the traditional methods to use any mobile reporting yet?

Doug Greer (30:28)

Yeah. The mobile apps are great for Jaspersoft. They do work, but as Josh pointed out, the authentication, because Clarity has embedded Jaspersoft inside of Clarity, the authentication to be able to get into it is going to be a little different, and so that’s something I know CA is looking toward, and working on a way to do that, so you can use those tools for the Jaspersoft instance inside of Clarity.

Jason Soulier (31:08)

How about a question from our community, “For hosted Clarity, Clarity On-Demand, will there be a cut over date or will organizations be able to migrate to 14.2 on their schedule?”

Josh Leone (31:25)

At least for the first year, they’ll be able to cut over on their schedule, which is pretty traditional on how CA works. My understanding is April 10th is the first day it will be available, so any new customers that sign up for Clarity that will get it prior. Post and further on will get 14.2 by default. Customers that are on earlier releases will just schedule it out with CA, and then at some point down the road, I know CA will get more aggressive, especially with customers with older versions to start moving you up, so you don’t get affected by any drop support dates.

Doug Greer (32:10)

And 14.2 does still support BO as well, so even if you get onto that, you can still use your same reports, but it would be the next major version that comes out, that is the one that you would be required to move to Jaspersoft.

Jason Soulier (32:22)

Great. So I’ll turn the topic over to you, pass the ball to you panelists. Are there any other topics the panelists want to suggest as conversation pieces?

Atul Kunkulol (32:31)

One of the things I would like to talk about is dashboards, and as we’ve been talking about, Jaspersoft does have dashboard capability, but it is, right now, it is at a stage where dashboards are really a collection of reports, so you can pass parameters, and  the dashboards could be a reflection of . . . it would mimic running several reports on one page.

Xcelsius, in the past, or what it is right now, does offer much more—richer—data visualization techniques. So, although this is a step back in terms of dashboard, I think the next version which comes out, Version 6, will have the data visualization capability, and that could even beat Xcelsius at that point.

Jason Soulier (33:32)

Good topic. Any other comments on that dashboard topic?

Josh Leone (33:37)

Yeah. Not on the dashboard specifically, but on what you were asking about. So my friends at CA, when we heard we were doing this hangout, wanted to make sure a couple things definitely got in here. Some changes and performance improvements to the investments hierarchy job. Very, very specific. Were made. Where the speed of that job specifically should be faster.Our friends at CA wanted to make sure we shared that for sure.

And something I always wanted to bring up is performance data in general, starting in 14.1, all the underpinnings were put in that will aggregate access logs, and bring that data in the database, so you can graph, and you can see and monitor the performance of your own system. Those jobs, like I said, actually came in 14.1, but are available there in 14.2. I would definitely encourage users to poke around and look at those tables. They’re documented in the release notes. And start to look at how you can monitor your performance.

We plan on writing some portlets and things that we’ll give away as part of the regoXchange and start to utilize that new Studio Content Manager feature that also came in 14.1, but was enhanced or 14.2, and start to show how we can share content around easier. That whole SCM features concept is that XOG is a little complicated, hard to use. We should be able to package up content, ship it around in a zip file and move stuff that way, so we’re going to start to do some of that. We’ll post it on the regoXchange, which Jason could give a little plug for, and it will be a good way to move content around.

Jason Soulier (35:18)

Great.

Atul Kunkulol (35:18)

Hey, Jason – sorry, Josh—I’m not sure if you talked a lot about the MS Project enhancements.

Josh Leone (35:27)

Yeah, so there’s a couple of functional enhancements that were done. You can look through the release notes on those, but the thing I think is the most exciting piece is the performance part of it. The technology used, up until this year, has been the same technology used for essentially the last ten years. And CA made a big effort, a big investment, into changing that to use Microsoft’s newer API’s.

Some testing has yielded massive performance increases—crazy numbers. Both drivers are shipped with the product, so you can decide which one works the best, but I can tell you that they made a heavy, heavy investment in it, and they’re very much committed to MSP as a tool, as a scheduler, and I’m very excited to see, you know, over the next coming months, what end user experience is really like for it. So they’ve had some very, very skilled developers working on that that have a decade of MSP experience on that, and I think it’s really going to make a difference for those MSP customers. That alone is a big reason to upgrade.

Doug Greer (36:31)

I’ve got a question for Atul. Atul is our resident expert on Xcelsius. So you’ve used a lot of that, and you’ve used this new dashboarding in Jaspersoft. What do you think of the new tool compared to Jaspersoft? It is easier to use? Is it more powerful?

Atul Kunkulol (36:51)

Yeah. I made the comment earlier, but it is. Jaspersoft is an easier tool to use. It’s like creating a dashboard in Clarity, where it’s a collection of folders. In Jaspersoft, it’s a collection of reports. Although that doesn’t offer a lot of interactivity, it’s created right inside Clarity. You don’t need any software downloaded or any special training for this. And the next version of Jaspersoft is going to be, will have the add-on for data visualization, which I think opens up a lot of features that you can use for this. So I’m excited about the dashboard feature. Right now, I think it still has a ways to catch up on Xcelsius.

Josh Leone (37:57)

And either Atul or Doug. Have either of you used the Jasper Studio Tool yet?

Doug Greer (38:07)

Yeah. I think we’ve both used it. I would say, it’s very powerful. It’s actually based on Eclipse. So they took Eclipse, and they have—as a base—modified it and made that into the studio tool. So if you’re a developer, if you’re familiar with Eclipse, I think it’s going to be a really good transition because you’ll already be very familiar with the menus and the interface.  It’s very powerful—a lot you can do with it.

Atul Kunkulol (38:35)

And to add on to that, Doug, CA does offer it as professional license, for the studio, right?

Doug Greer (38:46)

Yeah. You can go to your CA support account, and along with the 14.2 install for Clarity, there’s also a download for Jaspersoft Studio.

Jason Soulier (39:00)

So just a quick question. This is probably an easy yes or no. “Is Jaspersoft a separate purchase that has to be implemented before we can install the upgrade?”

Atul Kunkulol (39:12)

No. It is . . . Go ahead, Doug.

Doug Greer (39:17)

It’s a separate install, but no, no separate license. It’s packaged right into the tool.

Jason Soulier (39:28)

How about the question of, is the new functionality of moving code from subProd instances to Prod instances available? Where presently it’s either manual or via XOG.

Josh Leone (39:49)

Yeah, that’s the Studio Content Manager feature. So, yeah. That first came out in 14.1 but continued to be developed in 14.2, and its purpose is exactly that. XOG is too complicated: utilize the add-in section of Clarity, add in the objects you want to do, generate a file you can then promote up or down, as you needed. For us as a consulting department, it’s very interesting because we have the chance of shipping content around using that feature. So it’s got to meet all sorts of customer requirements. It a . . . it will be exciting to have.

Jason Soulier (40:30)

Go ahead, Atul.

Atul Kunkulol (40:32)

Adding to what Josh said, in terms of Jaspersoft, there is important export capability available, where you can export it out of one environment and import it into another environment, so that  . . . it is similar to XOG, but in here it would have all of your resources—the images and everything else—along with the report to ship it over to another environment.

Josh Leone (40:58)

So it that equivalent to what the BIAR File was for BO?

Atul Kunkulol (41:03)

Doug, can you comment on that?

Doug Greer (41:04)

Yeah, similar to that. Yep. You can package all of your Jaspersoft content and export it—and then import it to another environment, just like the BIAR file in Business Objects. I’ve got a question for Jason. If any of our clients want to see 14.2 what options do they have to see a demo of that?

Jason Soulier (41:31)

Contact your Rego account manager, or contact us as sales@regoconsulting.regouniversity.com. We’re happy to provide any demo of it. You just don’t want me doing the demo. But we’re happy to do it. And Josh will do it any time of the day, right? Middle of the night? People can wake you up.

Josh Leone (41:57)

There are people way more qualified than me here to do that.

[laughter]

Jason Soulier (42:06)

Alright. A couple of point questions. “Would 14.2 support mobile app functionality for SSO customers?” And someone is going to have to help me with that acronym.

Josh Leone (42:20)

Yeah. It’s probably in reference . . . I’m going to guess it’s in reference to mobile time because of some previous SSO problems. I don’t know offhand if it did. I actually thought support came in for that in the 13.3 release, but we’ll have to go and follow up on that.  It’s not yet ready for the Jasper mobile client stuff. But I was under the impression it was already there for mobile time, but I’ll put  a note to follow up on that.

[Follow up: Assuming that question was for Mobile Time Manager (MTM.) The MTM App can work against a SSO (single sign-on) server, but it isn’t SSO capable.  Meaning, you cannot access the MTM app and have it SSO your user in.  It does require a username and password.  It is capable of being logged in against a SSO (single sign-on) enabled server. Reference the following KB articles: TEC1730472, TEC958579] 

Jason Soulier (42:56)

“Anyone have an idea how long CA will support CA PPM 13.2?”

Josh Leone (43:02)

I believe it will be supported until . . . I think they dropped support for 13.1 when they came out with 14.2. So it’d be the next major release. And then they’ll push you up to 13.3. It’s usually a major release minus one, is what they want to support. So it will be the next—whatever the version is that comes out—it will be after that one. Then they’ll want to start to drop support for 13.2.

Jason Soulier (43:31)

Yes. And you’ll obviously want to contact CA directly to get specific answers there. That’s a great answer. I have another question here. I’m trying to read these real-time. Hopefully they fit for you guys. “Are there two different components to view / create the reports? Kind of viewer and report creator designer?”

Atul Kunkulol (44:02)

There are two different rights within Clarity. One will allow you to create new reports, and the other one will allow you to just view the reports. So it is possible. There are probably six different . . . that leads into the security question. There are probably six different rights. One is Advanced Reporting Navigate. As long as you have Navigator Access, you can run—you can see—any of the reports, provided you have access to the data. There is “Create Domain,” “Create Reports,” “Create Dashboards.”  And those are the different rights available along with it. As long as the users have those rights, they can view and create the content.

Doug Greer (44:48)

And speaking of rights, just like Webi, Jaspersoft does have your security rights built in, as far as the underlying data. So if I am an ad hoc report creator, I could create a report to view all projects, but if I don’t have the rights to see all projects inside Clarity, I’m not going to get all the data. So that’s a great ability, so you don’t have to worry about granting people access and having them accidentally see stuff that they normally wouldn’t be able to see in Clarity.

Jason Soulier (45:29)

“Has CA increased the number of recommended custom attributes in 14.2?”

Josh Leone (45:35)

No. Those recommendations still stay the same. They’re trying to limit it based off of the technology used on how views are created—based off those attributes and objects. So there’s limitations on both Oracle and SQL Server on how big database views can get created. So those limitations are what govern really what those particular sizing limitations are. The only thing that would really increase for this release is the amount of portfolios, for the new portfolio feature, where they . . . I believe it’s up to 999 investments in a portfolio now. Before you just got a warning, opposed to it just being a hard stop at, I think, 150.

Jason Soulier (46:28)

Great. We’re about coming full. We don’t want this to run too long. Any closing comments from our panelists? Vipin, jump in too. Any sign offs or last words of wisdom?

Doug Greer (46:38)

I’ll say a few. If you haven’t signed up for regoUniversity yet, you should come. We’re having a big focus on Jaspersoft. So if you’re really interested in that, if you want to see it, we’re having a total of something like ten different sessions on Jaspersoft, so there’s going to be a lot you can learn there.

Jason Soulier (47:04)

Great. And that’s, again, May 3-6, at regoUniversity.com. Thanks, Doug for mentioning that. Any others from the group, thoughts about 14.2 and Jaspersoft and upgrading, any other topics maybe we didn’t hit, any closing comments from anyone else?

Atul Kunkulol (47:20)

I think it’s a great step forward. Everyone should have the upgrade to 14.2 on their radar because I think it just takes the reporting to the next level, and allows more flexibility and easier access to Clarity. The easier the tool is, the easier the adoption in the organization is. So I think it’s overall a win-win for everyone. So that’s my say on that.

Josh Leone (47:57)

And I would say the reason it took so long to get it out is because CA was wildly committed to get it right, right off the bat. They didn’t want to give something that wasn’t ready to be consumed. So it took a little bit of extra time in the oven to bake, but I think it’s going to be well worth it for customers to start to migrate off of Business Objects and take a hard look at Jasper.

Vipin Chouhan (48:24)

And 14.2 is targeted to be the most stable release after 13.3, so it definitely comes with lots of improvements, we may not able to covered all but yes there are definitely minor, but direct user impacting things, like MS 2013, the new drivers has been supported. My personal experience, I did struggle when I got MS Project 2013. I was struggling to make it work with 13.3, so those kind of minor implements, would definitely those help, like IE 11 has now been supported. So direct user impacting things, so great to have that on boarded.

Doug Greer (49:20)

I’m really excited. I think long-term it’s a great move.

Jason Soulier (49:28)

Yes. Let’s all give the big thumbs up. What are we saying on 14.2? [laughter] That’s five big thumbs-up. So thank you to our panelists who participated today. Personally, I’m relieved this went well. I was a little nervous this morning. But my great panelists came through with flying colors, and who knows, maybe you will see us on Meet the Press, at future time.

Josh Leone (49:56)

I hope not.

Jason Soulier (49:57)

Until then, we wish you Clarity users and the Clarity community all the best from Rego Consulting.

———-

Thanks for participating in the Rego community. We would love to answer any other questions you have about the CA PPM 14.2 update.

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