Monthly Poll 201510_201511 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

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Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

CAFE Only
0
No votes
A mixture of Client and CAFE
3
10%
A mixture of Client, Web and CAFE
15
52%
A mixture of Web and CAFE
4
14%
Client only
3
10%
Web only
2
7%
CAFE and BI only
0
No votes
Client and BI only
1
3%
Other clients with CAFE
0
No votes
Other clients without CAFE
1
3%
 
Total votes: 29

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jim wood
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Monthly Poll 201510_201511 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by jim wood »

It's monthly Poll time again....
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Alan Kirk
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Re: Monthly Poll 201510 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by Alan Kirk »

This is an interesting question. At the last conference that I went to IBM made it clear they they were looking to head toward two branches to replace with the multitude of clients now in existence. Leaving aside Cognos BI the intent was to have:
- All Admin and web presentation tasks under whatever Prism becomes known as (which we should find out sometime next month); and
- CAFE for all Excel-related work.

However they did recognise CAFE's limitations compared to Perspectives/ Client, because customers have told them. One of the principal ones is the absence of custom formulas that you can put into websheets / slice based reports / active forms (for everyone but Wim). Apparently this will be introduced at some point.

We've started to roll out CAFE to some ad hoc slicers and dicers. It has some bugs, notably with closing down the Excel session which often tends to hang, but it does have a better speed for those outside the LAN. However in its current state it's not capable of being a substitute for standard reports in legacy clients, particularly those from multiple cubes.

Consequently I'm the (first? only? time will tell) voter who nominated Client, Web and CAFE.
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George Regateiro
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Re: Monthly Poll 201510 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by George Regateiro »

Alan Kirk wrote:Consequently I'm the (first? only? time will tell) voter who nominated Client, Web and CAFE.
The only reason I did not select this option more relates to our org structure and inability to get IT to do things. I am hoping to ditch the clients ASAP purely for the WAN performance reasons and the hoops I have to jump through to get local versions in our remote data centers. It is probably a pipe dream (at least in the short term) but a CAFE/Web solution will be what we try to get to.
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Re: Monthly Poll 201510 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by Paul Segal »

I agree with George, but from a slightly different angle. I can see running some Clients, but I'd love for CAFE to have the same (or mostly similar) functionality as Perspectives. I could then dump the Citrix overhead/complication and the headache that can be with IT. I guess what I want (and have always wanted) is an Excel client with excellent WAN capabilities.
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Re: Monthly Poll 201510 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by silw »

We use a mixture of Client, Web and CAFE.

Client for deep analysis of data.
Web for approval and other lightweight tasks
CAFE for data input because it can work with data chanesls with ping 600 ms and allows to use excel links (with some VBA code). But it still quite crude :(
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Re: Monthly Poll 201510 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by TJMurphy »

All three of them, more's the pity.

* Cafe for people in far flung places with terrible speed over the WAN, if we can get it working then we should be able to decommission replication too. Challenge is finding time / resource to help users update their reports - testing so far with using Cafe on native formulae has not gotten very far.
* Web for PHBs (pointy haired bosses) who believe they need access to "everything" even though we know they won't ever look at it (delegate to their side kicks).
* Perspectives because so far that's where everything is now anyway.
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Re: Monthly Poll 201510 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by 4rtem »

I believe that all TM1 community is waiting when TM1 cafe will cover all spreadsheet functions of Perspectives.
Working through Citrix is really disappointing, while we do not have other opportunities in case of complex reports.
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Re: Monthly Poll 201510_201511 - Do you plan to use CAFE as a replacement or supplement for Client and Why?

Post by iansdigby »

For now, client only though we will upgrade from 9.0 to 10.2.2 sometime next year and explore CAFE, with the hope that it will make it easier for end users to create their own reports without having to master (or not) VIEW formulae and the like.

On an aside re. Citrix, I have always found it OK over VPN. Yes, licenses are expensive, yes it imposes extra accessibility/support hurdles for IT that can be most frustrating all round. But the basic premise of only streaming pixels over a WAN seems in principle more likely to be efficient than carting great loads of data around in a thing like CAFE. Maybe I don't understand it. Couldn't IBM put effort into providing a brilliant Citrix alternative (maybe they already do?) and bundle that with TM1? It seems not sensible to base our dislike of the Citrix way on IT issues only.

Anyway, if CAFE genuinely can shunt data around quickly enough it's a definite choice for us.
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