Hyperion - lets focus on infrastructure client story 3

This is one of my favorite clients. It's perhaps one of the typical Hyperion Planning environments. The business folks are running the Hyperion Planning environment. IT at this client site is there to help. The don't put up roadblocks or resent having Hyperion in the building. Well, I last visited this client about 2 years ago. Since that time they have restored using my directions more than a handful of times. It turns out that in the quest to be super responsive to the business environment, a couple of "oops" happened. The planning app ended up getting stuck so they made a copy of the Essbase app and have been running that for a few months. I recieved a call from their IT asking how to get this new Essbase app to show up on the planning web login screen.

Well, I thought that I preached too much when I'm at a site about what Hyperion Planning means to Essbase, but apparently not in this case. Hyperion Planning maintains the outline structure of Essbase. Virtually all outline changes must run through planning first then get pushed to Essbase. In this case they restored the Essbase outline not the entire Hyperion Planning app. The answer to their question is "no. This Essbase app cannot be made available through the planning log in screen". The resolution is that the planning app needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. It turns out this is acceptable to the client as they were ready to rework some dimensions materially. They were also able to function because the extensive business logic in the business rules can be run against native Essbase as well as Hyperion Planning.
Lessons learned:
-development environments are very important. Even if you don't have a development server, at least make a copy of your production app for testing different business requirements.
-always make changes to the outline structure in Hyperion Planning then push them to Essbase via a refresh.

hj