A lot of good information was presented.  Hopefully it wasn't too dry or boring.  I believe everyone got all of their questions answered.  On a side note, a laptop running system 11.1.1.3 was being used for a presentation.  I can commit that our future meetings will have Hyperion Planning running on 11.1.1.3 and most likely 11.1.2.  If you'd like to see these in action be sure to come to the next meeting.

Tony provided some great tradeoffs in using HFM versus using Hyperion Planning.

The PC Magazine article was a great discussion topic as it went through their "lessons learned" while implementing a world wide budgeting system.  It sounded like a fairly complex system as they appear to be running at least 40 servers for their Hyperion Implementation.

In discussing comparisons of 11.1.1.3 and 11.1.2, one of our members indicated that they have a customer that is currently planning to go live on 11.1.2.  At this time they have not hit any snags preventing them from moving forward.

There was plenty of geek talk at the end in a free form fashion.  Folks got to ask all kinds of questions of the group.  A lot of knowledge was shared.

Group discussion:

• -we learned that one customer is running 11.1.2 and planning on going live on production in the near future
• -question of IE8 compatibility with System 9 was raised: there is a patch for this purpose and I'm researching the level of pain implementing this.
• -one customer heard about the lifecycle of System 9 ending in Jan 2012.  He determined that although they just went live, they already have to budget for an upgrade in fy11 for a Hyperion Planning upgrade
• -discussed the differences and services that System 11.1.2 bring about

The group had representation from 5 different customers, 4 consulting shops and Oracle.  The Oracle representation is actually from a member on the development team for Hyperion Smartview.  This is a great opportunity for us to help steer future development of this essential tool.

Possible topics for the next meeting penciled in are:

• Essbase Stuidio - Todd Binenstock
• ODI and meta data loading - Shane Eckert
• Walk through Smartview for 11.1.2 - Oracle

If you have a topic you'd like to see presented or would like to present, let us know.  I believe we can get Oracle to show us some additional tools if we just ask.

Hopefully the Smartview topic will be a good presentation for our business type users.  We're trying hard to provide some content for the business users of Hyperion. 

We pretty much already have our agenda for the next meeting.  We're thinking about meeting monthly on the 3rd friday.  At this time, we have penciled in Feb 18th, 2011 as our next meeting date.