Major Accident Hazard Analysis by Jez Stroud

Yesterday I published an article on my entry into the Aiimi internal BI competition; the Stock Analyser Application which allowed a user to track stocks for different companies and decide whether or not to invest into them based on the displayed key performance indicators.

Stock Analyser Application by Kingsley Hau

I have recently been blogging about an internal BI competition within Aiimi to create some great dashboards/mobile applications. The deadline was monday just gone and we presented our apps to our managers and seniors yesterday. With the competition now over I think it would be nice to write a few blogs for each of the applications to showcase our work.

Aiimi’s Internal BI Competition Update

Last week I wrote a short blog hinting at an internal BI competition being held by Aiimi to see who could design and create the best looking (and practical) dashboard in MicroStrategy.

Today is the deadline for that competition and since we are coming to the final stages of developing our entries I thought I’d write a quick blog to display some of the differences in comparison to the dashboards I showed last week and the ones we have today.

Aiimi’s BI Team learn MicroStrategy Web Design tips from Sylvain Le Moel

For the past two days our business intelligence team has undergone some training provided by Sylvain Le Moel to help improve our approaches and knowledge of how to develop and use MicroStrategy mobile web dashboards.

Sylvain Le Moel is a senior director of the Mobile Solutions department in MicroStrategy with many years of experience in developing dashboards. His main aim during his time with our team was to teach us how to best make use of business intelligence and extract the greatest value from mobile web dashboards.

It’s On – Aiimi’s collaboration project with Southwark Schools to provide business intelligence around activities/clubs for young people

After meeting with Southwark Council and a number of local schools, it became clear that a number of young people in Southwark were not only unclear on what activities/clubs were available to them but the young people would be more likely to attend activities/clubs if they knew who else was attending. Therefore For almost a year now, Aiimi has been working in collaboration with 12 students from 4 schools from Southwark to create an online portal, called It’s On, which will provide intelligence and analysis regarding the local activities young people are involved in. The outcome of It’s On will act as a proof of concept and will feed into a further project that the Council will be starting later in the year to create a social media site for young people in Southwark. One of the key elements of the project is to bring increased awareness and an understanding of the IT and more specifically business intelligence to young people. One of the many functions of the portal is to present statistical reports (information) regarding the demographic breakdown of young people who attend specific activities and activity types. To generate these reports, Aiimi has decided to use the SSRS tool.

IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Installing Client Side Certificate for SSL Authentication

This short blog is the final instalment of a series of blogs which have explained how to configure a server to use SSL authentication (IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Configuring Server Side SSL Authentication) and how to create a pair of self-signed certificates using the Windows makecert tool (IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Creating SSL Client and Server Certificates).

This blog will explain how a client certificate should be installed onto a web browser which will enable it to access the website being protected by a SSL authentication layer.

For this example, Internet Explorer 9 will be the browser used so the steps may not exactly fit for any other mediums such as Chrome or Firefox. However I’m sure that those browsers will have similar configuration options which allow a user to install certificates.

IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Creating SSL Client and Server Certificates

This blog follows on from my first blog IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Configuring Server Side SSL Authentication which explained how the SSL Authentication layer could be setup and enabled on Windows Server 2008. This blog will explain the certificate creation process which is required on both the server and clients to enable each party to be granted access through to each other. In truth the contents of this blog is largely taken from Ondrej’s Blog which I previously mentioned; but I felt it would be good to bring those guidelines and augment them.

IIS 7, SSL, and Two Factor Authentication – Configuring Server Side SSL Authentication

Recently Aiimi asked to implement a second layer of security for a client’s websites which would use SSL certificate authentication. Since Aiimi didn’t have anyone which a specific expertise in this area I set off into the internet in search of examples and guidelines. Surprisingly, there doesn’t really seem to be a comprehensive guide on how IIS 7 can be configured as well as how self-signed certificates can be created (certificates obtained from CA authorities can also be used but for this task it wasn’t necessary). Whilst there are articles and guides for certain steps of the process which are certainly of good use, I decided that an end to end guide would be beneficial to those who are tasked with a similar problem. This guide will come in the form of 3 separate blogs which will take you through each phase of the whole process.

First tech blog – SSL Certificate Authentication

To kick things off I have prepared a series of tech blogs which document my experiences in implementing client certificate authentication (SSL). This was a challenge which Aiimi was asked to explore by a client who wished to have an extra layer of security for their Livelink website.

When browsing around Google for some guidelines I found various bits and pieces scattered across a number of different websites and forums. But a complete end to end solution was nowhere to be found (Many people claimed that there is no “clear way” to solve this issue, which is true in a way); therefore I thought it would be a nice first blog for me to provide a complete documentation of what I did in order to get things working.

There are 3 blogs in total and I will aim to upload one each week (gotta keep up the suspense!).

Welcome to my Blog – A bit about myself and Aiimi

So i’ve recently decided to begin blogging about the interesting challenges I encounter in work and talk about what I did (or am doing) to overcome those and create a solution.

Before I dive into blogging I guess a brief introduction of myself and the company I work for would be handy as a first post.

I am currently a Business Intelligence consultant based in London working for a company called Aiimi. Aiimi, based in London, has the largest UK team of certified OpenText & MicroStrategy resources. Whilst the main focus is on ECM & BI they also expand out to help clients build fully integrated solutions with the likes of SAP and Microsoft.

Whilst hired as a BI consultant, my knowledge extends somewhat beyond Data Integration, Reporting and Dashboards, and Database Analysis. Coming from a Computer Science background I am also capable of joining a code development team and have worked on various other projects which included Content Management and Portal Development. I’m sure that this list will only continue to grow as I spend more time working in Aiimi.

Over time I will aim to blog about these technologies, my experiences in using them (and others), and also hopefully share some of the culture which I get to enjoy as a member of Aiimi 🙂