Having another Administrator in your pocket
What do you like best?
I probably use Infoscheduler the most but Object Manager probably saves the most time. Having a list of all of your Business Objects report schedules is an Excel spreadsheet is priceless. Global updates are easy. Need to add someone to receive reports that are being emailed to another person, you can do a find on the spreadsheet and find everywhere it occurs. A network share is being updated and you have to update all of your reports that deliver report files to that location? Piece of cake, Find and Replace. What about password updates? Easy, just filter on that database and you can update all of the schedules at once. That takes care of the report schedules but what if you need to update all of the passwords in the report object itself for view on demand reporting? Use Object Manager, grab all of the reports in a list and select them. Update them in bulk. These tools save you so much time, it is like having another administrator working with you. Instance Manager can scan and find a list of fail instances, you can rerun the instances and have those failed instances deleted. You can scan and find all of your recurring instances in your system and use that list to feed your Infoscheduler spreadsheet. Also, you can look at your folder security at a glance by using Object Manager.
What do you dislike?
There is nothing to dislike. If something is missing in the product, you can request to have it added. If it is a worthwhile request, they will add it to the product. APOS Systems does a great job at keeping the products relevant to the administrator's job needs.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
I've mentioned a bunch already but what I found to be really helpful was in Object Manager. We had to reorganize a deep folder structure with elaborate folder security. In the CMC, you have to go into each folder and look at the security settings to make sure you have replicated everything properly. Using Object Manager, I was able to see all of the folders and their security settings in a grid view and make updates to the settings as needed. This saved a lot of time and helped to make an accurate security transition. Being able to see the whole security structure at once for the groups that I was interested in was a great time saver.