I know it’s been some time since I’ve last posted and there is soooo much going on in the Xcelsius community. To start, we now have over 1,000 members in our LinkedIn group, over 600+ followers in Twitter and we just created a new LinkedIn group dedicated to the Xcelsius SDK, FleXcelsius…and the excitement continues! I was also recently nominated to be an SAP Mentor, the first to solidly represent Xcelsius in the SAP world, a huge honor.  Most exciting is the opportunity to bring the Xcelsius Gurus network to the SAP Business Object Community (aka BOC).  I will provide a separate blog post on how this will have a positive impact on the Xcelsius Gurus network and how I see things coming together. I invite everyone to benefit and be a part of it.  Last but not least, I have spent most of the year getting the commercial side of EverythingXcelsius up and running and we are scheduled to go live before the summer.  So this is quite exciting, as we have worked with so many clients, but now will have a separate presence to display what we’ve done.

Now that I got that mouthful out of the way, I have been adding to my book collection and had to share three exciting new books that you must purchase. These books were written by our fellow community members, and are MUST HAVES for Xcelsius and BI Developers. You can purchase all 3 on SAP Press under the BusinesObjects category, or if you’re like me and use Amazon, feel free to purchase directly from our new reading list!

The 1st book, A User’s Guide to Creating Dashboards in Xcelsius, by our very own FleXcelsius Guru, Evan Delodder and Ray Li, provides a practical explanation on building your own Xcelsius Dashboards with detailed steps and best practices. While this book is tentatively not available until September 2010 (they seemed to have pushed the date from July 2010), it is a MUST HAVE for all Xcelsius users simply because it’s the first book ever to hit the market that covers 2 topics that lack severely in content! 1) Xcelsius 2008 Enterprise Connectivity and 2) How to use the Xcelsius SDK.  I cannot say enough about not walking to, but RUNNING to get this book.  It’s only available for pre-orders right now (my signed copy is hopefully in the mail right, Evan??) but, I got a preview to the content and it is awesome!!

The 2nd book,  Reporting and Analytics with SAP BusinessObjects, by Ingo Hilgefort, provides an overview of SAP BusinessObjects reporting, analysis and visualizations tools. We are particularly excited about this book, because it is one of the only books that dedicates an entire chapter to explaining how to connect Xcelsius to SAP BI.  Not to mention, if you don’t know about Ingo he is SAP employee, a well known author of many SAP books and just one of the most brilliant guys I’ve had a chance to speak to.  There has been so much ambiguity around the SAP BI connector in Xcelsius since the release of SP3 that is a must have.  It has pics and all, not to mention Ingo would love to hear your feedback.

The 3rd book,  SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, by Jim Brogden, Mac Holden, and Heather Sinkwitz, provides an overview of SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and also covers advanced features including the SDK and linking with other SAP BI tools, including Xcelsius.  Now I admit there is not alot of content in here particularly around Xcelsius (something Jim promised me he would fix in his next book release) but since utilizing WebI goes hand in hand with Xcelsius development in the SAP Business Objects environment, this book is more than worth having.  I am watching my signed copy in front of me. Thanks Jim!

K folks I’ll be back with more exciting news and updates soon.  I am even considering doing a live webinar or podcast to discuss the books and have the authors present, kind of what Oprah does for her book club.  Send an email to gurus@everythingxcelsius.com if you are interested.  All of these guys are my friends and colleagues, so if we have enough interest, I’d be happy to get them online to discuss the books and answer your questions. We encourage everyone to get a copy of all three books and provide your comments and feedback.

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We also learned that this book was published by the Business Objects Press. Wonder why they are not promoting it?

For those of you not familiar with Loren Abdulezer, he is also the author of ‘Excel Best Practices for Dummies’, ‘Escape from Excel Hell’, ‘Excel Best Practices for Business’, and ‘Skype for Dummies’.

Of course when it becomes available we’ll post a review!

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