Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Customer Success – Western Kentucky University – APOS Administrator

Western Kentucky University (WKU) is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with Regional Campuses in Glasgow, Owensboro, and Elizabethtown-Fort Knox. WKU prepares students of all backgrounds to be productive, engaged, and socially responsible citizen-leaders of a global society. The University provides research, service and lifelong learning opportunities for its students, faculty, and other constituents. WKU enriches the quality of life for those within its reach.

Challenge

WKU uses SAP BusinessObjects as their reporting solution. They are currently running BI 4.2, but will upgrade shortly to BI 4.3. They were challenged by repetitive administrative tasks and change management as manual administration was time-consuming, labor-intensive and prone to human error.

Requirements

They needed:

• Rapid System Administration
  Rescheduling instances, updating schedules and instance status
• Agile Change Management
  Performing quick updates to printer names and print destinations, maintaining control over security settings on reports and folders, managing report ownership
• Automation of Repetitive Activities
  Making rapid updates to report database connection information

Solution: APOS Administrator

WKU selected APOS Administrator as the solution to meet its requirements. Administrator gave them:

• Centralized, high-volume security and object management
  Administrator allowed them to manage a large number of objects simultaneously, control security and printer destinations, and perform common maintenance tasks on users and groups.
• Easy-to-use bulk report scheduling management
  Administrator allowed them to create and execute schedules, manage schedule properties in bulk, and manage and update recurring schedules quickly and easily.
• Efficient bulk report instance management
  Administrator allowed them to see and manage their entire instance inventory, perform granular searches by report status, ownership and report IDs, and respond rapidly and in bulk to report failure scenarios.

Feedback

“We use APOS Administrator to change ownership of reports when we have personnel changes. This allows us to change the ownership of hundreds or thousands of report objects at a single time. The time it would take to do so manually would be extremely time consuming. We also use it to reschedule our recurring jobs during personnel changes. APOS makes it easy to change who owns a report without having to manually re-enter a ton of parameters and other report settings.

“The other area where we have successfully used APOS is changing where a report prints when a user area receives a new printer. Updating printers with APOS allows us to keep reports flowing to the end users with a minimum amount of administrative overhead.”

Brian Taylor, Database Administrator, Western Kentucky University