This year’s Kscope13 conference did not disappoint. Developers, administrators, business users, architects, tech experts and enthusiasts from all over the world gathered in New Orleans to enrich their technical expertise and help one another.

In addition to being surrounded by a multitude of opportunities to expand one’s technical capabilities, Kscope13 attendees were offered over 300 unique educational sessions, hands-on training courses, full-day symposiums, networking sessions and much more.

Overall, the content presented in these educational sessions and training courses was exceptional. Attendees had their pick of high quality content for traditional topics such as APEX, EPM, Essbase while also gaining new topics covering .NET programming, Building Better Software, and ADF! Oracle was on hand to discuss the latest and greatest releases, consultants shared some of their secrets/best practices in areas such as performance, customization, and infrastructure upgrades, vendors demonstrated their products and employees provided real world case studies.

A few of my personal favorite sessions were:

• What would Happen if I Did …. in HFM (Part 2)
• Stump the Experts – Hyperion EPM Panel
• 11.1.2.3 Upgrade and Design Consideration for HFM
• Installing Oracle EPM for Real
• Revenge of the Hyperion Financial Reports
• HFM API Deep Dive*

*– Biased as this was MY session!
On that note, I once again fielded a session focusing on API programming in EPM. Unlike the 2012 session, which took a shotgun blast approach to all sorts of EPM APIs, this year’s session shined a laser on the HFM COM API. The goal of the session was to walk the attendees through an entire application build from scratch.

In the session we covered installing the necessary HFM files to your computer, installing a development environment (Visual Studio), creating one’s first project, adding the necessary DLL file references, implementing key API calls, and compiling/executing one’s first program. To further help the attendees get started, I provided a complete sample project that could be used as a starting point.

In case you missed my session(s) or you want a copy of the presentation deck, you can find them here:

2013 Session: https://www.box.com/s/ttapg8dcwebw7z9p0k0x
2012 Session: https://www.box.com/s/a2ea627ae8c6f38c674c

NOTE: Links to source code are included in the files at the end of the slide decks.

Thank you to all Kscope13 organizers, the venue staff, ODTUG Board Members, presenters, vendors, and attendees for making the conference so successful. Hope to see you at Kscope14 in Seattle!

– Charles Beyer