I just finished giving a presentation for the OAUG on Essbase and it was probably way to technical for the audience, but I had a great time putting it together. It had a lot of great examples so if you are interested in downloading it you can find it here, http://www.mindstreamanalytics.com/presentations.html
The most interesting topic in my mind is the capability of Essbase ASO to perform allocations and custom calculations. It's a big leap forward for ASO and definitely sets the stage for ASO to take over more of what BSO is currently used for. However, the big downside right now is that the ASO calculations can't utilize member functions for the allocations and are limited on the custom calculation side. Think about having to have a different formula or allocation for every account instead of being able to group like allocation methodologies together with an @UDA() or @ATTRIBUTE() function, or even an @RELATIVE() function. Once ASO can leverage those types of powerful functions it will really be ready to take over for BSO. While some of the more advanced BSO calculations like @MOD() probably won't be in ASO for some time they aren't heavily used and to some degree I wonder if it's even worth Oracle's time to recreate them in ASO. The people that are using those types of functions probably don't need to move to ASO because the data set size is probably smaller.
Well, the NCOAUG conference is coming up along with the FP&A innovation conference in San Diego. Hope to see everyone at one of them!
