Applications are built in the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform using an object-oriented approach that is based on a set of core object building blocks. Some of these objects relate to standard programming primitives (such as loops or variables); some relate to interactions with the caller (such as inputs or menus). Yet some also relate directly to business-oriented aspects of the application, such as the Layer or the topic of this blog article: the Business Task.

The goal here is to introduce you to the concept, briefly explain how to use it in your applications, and to sketch some of the substantial benefits you can reap for very little effort.

The Concept

When customers call a self-service application, they usually don’t do so for the fun of it. They have a question they want answered, or a transaction they want to perform. As such, from the customer’s point of view the call cannot be considered successful simply if speech recognition worked and the application did not crash somewhere in the middle. Callers must have received their answer, or completed their transaction in order to really be contented with the application’s performance.

So application developers and business analysts face the challenge of tracking this “semantic” information in addition to the more technical data on recognition quality, application errors, etc. This is where Business Tasks come in. They model specific caller actions of different types:

• Authentication
  E.g. logging in using an account number and PIN, or possibly authentication using biometric means.
• Information
  E.g. asking for an account balance or an insurance quote.
• Notification
  E.g. sending out an SMS or email to the caller.
• Routing
  E.g. transferring the caller to a human agent.
• Transaction
  E.g. making a money transfer or buying a product.
• Other
  Open-ended category to capture sundry other tasks.

At the highest level, Business Tasks distinguish between “complete” and “incomplete” termination. Tolstoy wrote that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In much the same sense there is effectively one way of completing a Business Task successfully, but many different ways for it to fail. Callers may change their mind and navigate elsewhere, or just hang up. Recognition may fail and prevent callers from making progress. A backend system may be down – and so forth.
Specifically, VoiceObjects distinguishes between seven different types of issues:

• Backend Error
  The task finished unsuccessfully because a backend system failed or was not available.
• Business Logic
  The task finished unsuccessfully because a certain business logic requirement was not met (e.g. an intended transaction exceeded a maximum set for the account).
• Caller Abort
  The task finished unsuccessfully because the caller explicitly aborted it e.g. through a command or through negative confirmation.
• Recognition Failure
  The task finished unsuccessfully because of recognition problems such as No Inputs and No Matches.
• Task Restart
  The task finished unsuccessfully because the same task was started again.
• Session Termination
  The task finished unsuccessfully because the session ended, i.e. the caller hung up or was transferred somewhere else.
• Technical Error
  The task finished unsuccessfully because of a technical problem within the application.

Along with a task’s status it is often desirable to also log certain bits of data. In the case of a car insurance quote e.g. it might be relevant to know the make and model the caller inquired about. For money transfers, the amount might be relevant. And there are, in fact, cases in which different types of data are of interest depending on whether the task was completed successfully or not.

That’s why each Business Task carries two (optional) parameter sets defining the data to be logged in case it completes successfully or unsuccessfully. There is also a convenience option to use the same data in both cases.

How To Implement

When implementing a VoiceObjects application, you can think of a Business Task as an interval: From where a specific task is started, to where it is completed successfully. You only need to define these end points; VoiceObjects Server pretty much takes care of the rest for you.

The way to start a Business Task is by use of the Expression function STARTTASK(). The Expression object should be positioned at the appropriate place (or places) in the dialog flow at which the caller starts with the activity modeled by the Business Task. The start of a task is indicated in the dialog flow by a green “start” icon.

A Business Task can be finished “manually” at any point using the Expression function FINISHTASK(). Typically this is used to finish it successfully, i.e. as “completed”. Finishing a task is indicated in the dialog flow by a red “stop” icon.

One of the great advantages in using Business Tasks is that you do not need to explicitly track all possible outcomes. Rather, VoiceObjects Server takes care of this automatically and thus not only reduces your workload, but also eliminates the potential for errors or omissions – thereby improving the quality and consistency of the statistics data that is collected.
At the same time, you have the ability to influence precisely how VoiceObjects Server handles the automatic task completions. Specifically, this concerns the behavior in event handlers (i.e. when something goes wrong), in navigation (i.e. when the caller decides to move elsewhere), and in jumps within the application.

In all of these cases, you can select whether to finish the currently active task, all tasks (see below) – or to do nothing. If a task is finished, then its completion status is automatically inferred from the context. As an example, if you define an event handler for “No Match” and let it finish the active task, then that task is automatically finished with the status “Recognition Failure”. Likewise, a handler for “Error – Connector” automatically assigns a status of “Backend Error”.

Combined with the native VoiceObjects principle of inheritance, this means that you can define this behavior once within your root Module and have immediate, automatic, and consistent handling throughout your entire application.

How It Works

Once you have defined start and end points of task intervals, and made the selections for automatic completion, VoiceObjects Server takes it from there.
During a dialog session, it maintains a stack of Business Tasks. Only one of them is active at any given time, but others may be further down the stack, in an inactive state, ready to pop up again once the current one finishes.

All of this process is fully automatic and requires no interaction from your side. It gives you the powerful ability, though, to determine that e.g. in the example pictured above, the caller chose to buy a stock but then, before completing that transaction, first obtained some additional information on the stock in question. Only after having checked this information successfully did he return and finalize the purchase.

In other words: Business Tasks give you a panoramic window on caller behavior.

Infostore and Analyzer

Business Task information is available within the application (through the Expression functions TASKSTATUS, TASKREFID, and LASTTASK), but the primary interest tends to be in what gets written to Infostore. Two separate tables (VOLDTASKSTATS and VOLDTASKDATA) capture this information in detail, including e.g.

• completion status and performance of the task itself
  e.g. duration, number of input states, etc.
• application performance while the task was active
  e.g. No Input/No Match events, errors that occurred, etc.
• external interactions while the task was active
  e.g. calls to backend systems, database dips, etc.

VoiceObjects Analyzer offers a variety of insightful reports based on this data.

Since a Business Task effectively delineates an interval during which a caller attempted to achieve a certain goal, it lends itself to correlation with many other facts such as:

• Layers
  An example is shown in the picture above – how well are your different customer segments achieving their goals? In the example, the preferred Platinum category seems to have a problem that requires looking into.
• Recognition quality
  When callers fail to achieve their goals, it is of course crucial to analyze why this happens. Insufficient recognition quality can be a factor, caused e.g. by a lack of tuning in grammars or the speech recognition engine, or by application factors such as misleading prompts.
• Backend performance
  Another key factor deciding caller success is the performance of backend systems – in terms of both availability and responsiveness. Few callers wait a minute for a transaction to complete, so you will see many tasks aborted with “Session Termination”.
  I’ll provide more details on the rich data that VoiceObjects Server collects in regard to backend access in an upcoming blog article.

So if your application does not use Business Tasks yet, identify the key goals that callers want to achieve within it and cover them as described in the How To Implement section. The resulting Infostore data will help you understand much better what does and does not work for callers, and why – and thereby help you in making the application better!

You can find more information on Business Tasks and how to use them in the Design Guide as well as in the Object Reference. Both of them are freely available on the Developer Portal, along with our software downloads. There is also a Best Practices document with hands-on examples.

As always, for questions and comments, reach out to me on Twitter at @voxeostefan.

…it usually is.

Unfortunately that applies, mostly, to the Nuvelld Queue we were so happy to announce just the other day.
As it turns out, Gustav Nuvelld was not actually a famous Swedish mathematician but in fact an infamous Swedish mailman who, instead of delivering his mail to its rightful recipients, dropped it into the sewers – giving rise to the now-common /dev/null concept.

Also, the image we were made to believe by usually credible sources to depict Nuvelld does, in fact, show Gösta Mittag-Leffler (the famous Swedish mathematician of the early twentieth century who, we are keen to stress, did not run off with Nobel’s wife and is not the reason there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics!).

On the bright side, VoiceObjects does indeed provide a way of leveraging the performance of /dev/null (surpassed only, we are told, by the performance of Mongo DB) by using vo.noopStatsWriter=true (in vo.properties). As strange as this may seem at first glance, it is actually a really useful capability when performing load tests that you do not want to be impacted by sub-par performance of test environment databases. Infostore records can flow from the VoiceObjects Servers producing them in a swift, steady stream – and you can focus your performance metrics on application and server. (Clearly, when moving to the production environment, you will also want to measure real Infostore DB throughput – in a separate test.)

We apologize for any and all inconveniences caused, and sincerely encourage you to always mind the gap.

For additional questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @voxeostefan!

When Gustav Nuvelld, the reclusive Swedish mathematician of the early twentieth century, published his singular masterpiece “On the parameterization of collapsible Hilbert spaces” in 1912, few of his colleagues took any note. When he died just a few months later in a boat accident the details of which could never be fully explained, nobody cared; his body was never found.
Only years later, with the works of celebrated physicists like Schrödinger, Planck, and Dirac would it become apparent in hindsight how far ahead of his contemporaries Nuvelld had really been. Einstein himself was quoted as saying that “If Nuvelld had lived to see quantum mechanics, we would be a lot closer to a Grand Unified Theory!”

Explaining his profound work in layman’s terms is almost impossible, yet the most important practical application of these penetrating insights is the counter-intuitive ability to almost arbitrarily speed up waiting in line – similar in nature to the famous befuddling Banach-Tarski paradox.

Now, a hundred years after its inventor’s death, Voxeo celebrates Nuvelld’s legacy by introducing the Nuvelld Queue to VoiceObjects 12. It represents a stunning breakthrough in performance for the Infostore usage data repository and is, to the best of our knowledge, the first product implementation using Nuvelld’s principles. It comes after years of internal research and countless prototypes tested, tuned, and polished by our best engineers.

Simply stated, the Nuvelld Queue gives you virtually unlimited scalability at constant performance and throughput. Whether you run 30 ports or 30,000 – with the Nuvelld Queue, Infostore data flows in a swift steady stream. Real-time data collection becomes feasible where formerly nightly dumps dominated.

This is great news for our many major enterprise customers who run ever-increasing amounts of traffic from voice, text and web channels on our systems and rely on rapid, integrated reporting. But even if your present needs are not yet as ambitious, you can still benefit.

Interested in drinking from the fire hose? VoiceObjects 12 will be made available to select customers and partners in a pre-release version soon. Let us know if you want in on the action! To secure your place, or for questions and comments, reach out to me on Twitter at @voxeostefan!

After just having brought VoiceObjects 10.0 up-to-date, we’d like to give you a brief preview of things to come in the next few months, namely VoiceObjects 10.1. This is the release we’re currently working on, and it will focus on enhancements in Infostore and in Desktop for Eclipse.

Infostore
Every useful application needs to have some amount of backend access – be it reading a customer profile, setting status in a database, or triggering a transaction in an ERP system.

When analyzing an application’s performance it is therefore desirable to have detailed information on the performance of these backend calls. Infostore currently provides minimum, maximum, and total times (from which the average can readily be obtained).
With 10.1, a new table is introduced that tracks each backend call individually, for Connector and Database objects as well as, optionally, for Script objects. So for each individual call there is precise timing, as well as tracking of the amount of data sent to and received from the backend. Aggregate values are provided on the level of Business Tasks and for the entire dialog.

An ID can be assigned to each backend (e.g. “CRM”, “TrackingDB”, etc.) so that different calls to the same system can be grouped in reporting. This also enables you to analyze backend calls “in both directions”, i.e. access to different systems from within the same application as well as access to the same system from within different applications. Both are very relevant sets of questions when making sure that your production architecture is up to its task.

Desktop for Eclipse
More and more of you use Desktop for Eclipse to work in multiple different environments; not only standalone and VoiceObjects On-Demand mode but also multiple different network mode connections. So we have been asked whether we could make switching between multiple connections easier – and we’ve listened.

With 10.1 we’re switching from the current static division (standalone, network, VoiceObjects On-Demand) to a flexible model in which you can define any number of connections (of type network or VoiceObjects On-Demand) and switch between them at will. On top of that, we also make it easier to combine metadata and Control Center connections. This should be real boon to power users!

Beyond these major blocks, there are a number of smaller extensions such as improved support for REST-style interfaces. We will provide more information on these, and on the ones listed above, as we get closer to the release itself.

For the time being: Make sure you have VoiceObjects 10.0 R2, lean back, relax, and enjoy the ride toward 10.1

Hello

it is springtime! Good time to visit Cologne. Here is our special offer for VoiceObjects training in our German Training Center:

Take both classes

back-to-back in April, and one class will be free. Or take just one class but with two or more people, and one seat will be free.

See you in Cologne, your

Voxeo University team

Did you ever want to point users of your BusinessObjects environment to different data sources (e.g because they belong to different subsidiaries, etc.) ?
As you might know a BusinessObjects universe can only belong to a single data source connection. So how could you achieve that the connection changes depending on a user login?

The answer is to use a feature called “Connection Overload” that is somewhat hidden within BusinessObjects. This blog post describes how this feature perfectly fits together with a multi-tenant setup of VoiceObjects.

Lets imagine for a moment that you have a VoiceObjects multi-tenant setup with two custom sites, representing subsidiaries in the USA and Germany. As their deployments are separated within VoiceObjects based on their sites, you also want to make sure that the reporting is filtered that way. In addition to the two sites and their users you have administrators who are responsible for maintaing and operating the entire VoiceObjects installation, so they should also get a combined view in the reporting.

At first you would have to create the VIEW layer (remember that the Business Intelligence tool always is pointed at the VIEW layer of Infostore, not at the TABLEs) for all three groups:
1) Create three database logins, each having the proper rights to access the Infostore tables that are filled with data by VoiceObjects Server and to create VIEWs.
2) Login as the first DB user and execute the LDVWCreate_EN.sql script that is delivered with VoiceObjects. This will create the unfiltered VIEW layer for the administrators.
3) Login as the second DB user and run the same script but with an additional WHERE condition that filters out all data not belonging to the US subsidiary
4) Log in as the third DB user and run the same script this time with the site filter for the German subsidiary
NOTE: Example scripts for the steps 2-4 for SQL Server & VoiceObjects 10.0 can be downloaded here.
5) Use a DB query tool to verify that all three VIEW layers were created and that they contain the right data, e.g. run the following small sql statement:
SELECT * FROM VOLDSITOBJ
It should return, depending on the DB user you run it with, either entries for all three sites (System, USA and Germany) or just USA or just Germany.

Next you would need to create three corresponding ODBC connections (VIEW_Infostore_All, VIEW_Infostore_USA and VIEW_Infostore_GER) on the server machine running BusinessObjects as well as three connections (Infostore_All, Infostore_USA and Infostore_GER) within BusinessObjects Designer using the previously created ODBC connections.

Now you need to create two additional BusinessObjects users, by using the BusinessObjects Central Management Console, one for the US and one for the German subsidiary (the standard admin user will be used to access the unfiltered data).
After that switch back again to BusinessObjects Designer and create two access restrictions (Tools -> Manage security… -> Manage Access Restrictions). In the pop-up windows select “New” at the bottom of the left pane. Then define the access restriction by setting a name (e.g. USA_repository) and selecting the connection that corresponds to the US subsidiary. Next create a similar 2nd access restriction for the German subsidiary.
Once both access restrictions have been created you need add the newly created users by clicking on “Add user or group” on the bottom of the right pane and then map those to the users you just created by using the “Apply” button in the middle of the “Manage Access Restrictions” window. Map the access restriction for US to the US user and do the same for the German one as well. Click OK to save your changes afterwards.

Back on the Designer screen, select “File” -> “Parameters” and select the Infostore_All connection and confirm by clicking “OK”.
Then save and export the universe.

Next we need to set the proper rights to the newly created users, so that they can access the universe and the reports.
In order to do that do the following:
1) Login as admin to the Central Management Console
2) Define “VIEW-On-Demand” rights for all Connections to all users, additionally “Full Control” rights are needed on the connection the user belongs to
3) Define “Full Control” rights for both users on the folders, categories and universes belonging to VoiceObjects Analyzer.
If you have any problems with the right assignments please contact your BO administrator or refer to the corresponding BO documentation.

Finally, log in as administrator, US_subsidiary and GER_subsidiary and run a report to verify that you do get the expected results. A good example would be “Service Analysis” from “Application Development and Tuning”. The report should either show you all services or just those services belonging to your subsidiary (= site), depending on which user you used to run the report.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading and following the steps through this blog post, next time we will show you how you can create “rolling” filters (e.g. for the last 7 days) in MicroStrategy and how these can be used for scheduling a report.

MicroStrategy is now offering an new 5-day training course in Germany. The main goal of this course is allowing course participants bringing in their own data models, which will then be used as the basis for creating a MicroStrategy metadata layer on top of them as well as for developing corresponding reports.  At the end of the course all created reports and the metadata modell are delivered to the attendees together with a version of the free reporting suite of MicroStrategy.

More details can be found at:

http://www.microstrategy.de/kostenlosereportingsoftware/

http://www.microstrategy.de/files/Quickstart%20Kurs%20MicroStrategyRS%202010.pdf

Now that Revision 1 of VoiceObjects 9.0 is available and Prophecy 10 can be previewed, it is time to look toward the bright future again.

VoiceObjects has always offered the Control Center, which gives you an up-to-the-minute view of what’s going on in your deployment and lets you take action. The information available in the Control Center covers e.g. current call volumes as well as general status information on Infostore etc. You can activate application changes, deploy and undeploy services, take server instances down for maintenance, and more.

Coming up during the remainder of this year, you will also be able to access deployment-related reports directly from within the Desktop for Eclipse Control Center:

If you’re familiar with the VoiceObjects architecture you will know that we use a Server-Instance-Service paradigm: Applications are deployed as services onto logical servers, which in turn can be run on multiple instances in a cluster to facilitate load balancing and failover.
Reports will be available on all three of these levels, covering e.g. the number of sessions over time for various ranges.

Similarly it will be possible to check e.g.  on load distribution within a cluster to make sure that each instance carries its fair share.

Or to dig into call durations for individual services to see how callers fare.

There will even be direct access to Business Task information, so you can see right from the Control Center not just whether an application is up and running, but whether it actually does its job of giving callers what they want.

Sounds good? Then wait until you hear what else is in store

To learn more, contact us, follow us on Twitter – or visit us in New York at SpeechTEK 2009. We’re in booth 800 and look forward to meeting you!

A few weeks ago you have learned how to enable Infostore on your Developer Edition. Once the connection to Infostore has been established, detailed information about the calls to your application are beeing logged to the Infostore repository.  By the way if you want to learn how you can fill your new Infostore repository faster than by manually making calls, join us for our next Developer Jam Session taking place on July 29 at 11am Eastern to learn about LoadTester. Registration is open now.

With VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy 9 now available for download from the VoiceObjects Developer Portal (for the free Developer Edition) as well as from the VoiceObjects Service Portal (for existing customers), and the parallel offering of the free available MicroStrategy 9 Reporting Suite you can now complete your package of free solutions to get all the possibilities to create and call applications with Voxeo VoiceObjects  Developer Editon, and to analyze the callers’ behavior by running one of the 50 standard reports that are part of VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy 9.

A detailed description on how to download, install and configure MicroStrategy 9 and VoiceObjects Analyzer is available here. Follow the descibed steps and come back to this post once MicroStrategy 9 is running properly and VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy has been imported successfully.

In the following we will briefly describe how you can run one of the standard reports delivered with VoiceObjects Analyzer in MicroStrategy 9. Keep in mind that running a meaningful report requires to have at least some useful data in your Infostore repository. By the way, we are planning to extend our free offering by adding a package of Infostore demo data. Stay tuned for more details within the next couple of weeks!

1. Open MicroStrategy Desktop (typically available from the start menu “Start” -> “All programs” -> “MicroStrategy” -> “Desktop”).
2. Provide the login details as defined in the Intelligence Server configuration (default is Administrator and empty password).
3. Open the Project Source “VoiceObjects Analyzer” (or any other name you have defined in the Project Source creation process).
4. Open the project “VoiceObjects Analyzer v9 R1″.
5. The standard reports can be found in the folder “Reports” below “Public Objects”. They are distributed in three categories “Administration and Maintenance”, “Application Development and Tuning” and “Business and Caller Analysis”. Refer to the Analyzer Guide for detailed information on the different reports.
6. As an example open the report “Number of Sessions by Day” from the category “Administration and Maintenance”.
7. In the upcoming prompts select the service and pick at least the year on which the report should be run. Click  “Finish” to start the report. You should get a report looking similar to the following example:
   
8. Now you can enjoy exploring the variety of available reports.

As always, if you have any problems, questions, or suggestions do not hesitate to contact our Extreme Support.

The following text describes how to download, install and configure MicroStrategy and VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy to properly work together.
Before we begin with the installation process itself you should take a moment and step through the prerequisites, so that everything needed is available for the setup.

Prerequisites & System Requirements:

• VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy 9 (download from the Developer Portal)
• MicroStrategy 9 free reporting software (download from MicroStrategy – ~ 1,8 GB!)
  NOTE: Registration is required before you can download MicroStrategy 9.
  Once registered you will receive an email with a license key that must be entered during the installation process.
• A Infostore repository with at least some logging data in it
• Microsoft Office 2002 or higher
• Acrobat Reader version 7 or higher
• Adobe Flash Player version 9.0

Once you have completed collecting all the material we can start with the installation process.

Installation:

1. Double-click the file MICROSTRATEGY9.exe to start the installation.
2. Enter the license key you received from MicroStrategy.
3. Follow the instructions and keep all default settings.
4. Send activation request.
5. Restart your computer.

After the installation you now need to activate and configure MicroStrategy properly.

Activation & Configuration

First open the “License Manager” from the start menu and switch to the tab “License Administration”. Click “Next” and select the option “Server Activation using Activation Code”. Now paste in the activation code you have received by email after you sent the activation request during the installation process of MicroStrategy.

Click “Next” to finish the activation process.

Secondly you need to configure MicroStrategy to import the VoiceObjects Analyzer package and connect to your Infostore repository. If after restarting your machine the “Configuration Wizard” of MicroStrategy has not started automatically, you need to go to the start menu and open it manually. The “Configuration Wizard” is used to:

• generate or update the metadata tables of MicroStrategy (as the downloaded package is already updated to MicroStrategy 9, this option can be skipped);
• configure the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server;
• create the connection to the project sources, which will be VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy in our case.

1. Select the option “MicroStrategy Intelligence Server”. Click “Next” to continue.
2. On this screen the DSN (Data Source name) must be selected that represents the connection to the MicroStrategy metadata tables. Click “New” to define a new DSN.
3. On the upcoming screen click “Next” to continue.
4. Next, the appropriate driver for the DSN must be selected. Select “Other Relational Databases”. Click “Next” to continue.
   
5. Select the appropriate Microsoft Access driver, e.g.  “Microsoft Access Driver” if you have the English version of Microsoft Access installed. Click “Next” to continue.
6. Define a name and description for the new DSN and click  “Select”. In the upcoming file dialog browse for the downloaded VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy file (VoiceObjectsAnalyzer_forMicroStrategy_90.mdb) and click  “OK”.
7. Click “OK” again to finally create this DSN.
8. Back in the DSN screen you will find this new DSN selected. Click “Next” to continue.
9. If not already provided as default values use Administrator as user name and leave the password field empty. Click “Next” to continue.
10. Define a name for the new Intelligence Server, e.g. MicroStrategy. Click “Next” to continue.
11. Select the checkboxes “VoiceObjects Analyzer v9 R1″ in order to load the package on start-up and “Start Intelligence Server when finished” to start the Intelligence Server automatically after the configuration process. Click “Next” to continue.
12. If a warning message pops up complaining about a missing DSN, this can be ignored. The missing DSN will be defined later in the configuration process.
13. Check the summary. Click “Finish” to finally start the configuration of the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server.
14. After a successful configuration click “Close” to return to the Overview page of the Configuration Wizard.
15. Back on the Overview page select the option “Project Sources”. Click “Next” to continue.
16. Define a name for the project source, e.g. VoiceObjects Analyzer, and select the option “MicroStrategy Intelligence Server (3 Tier)”. Click “Next” to continue.
17. Select the machine on which your MicroStrategy Intelligence Server is running and provide the corresponding port number, if you have changed the default port. Click “Next” to continue.
18. Keep the default selection “Use login id and password entered by the user (standard authentication)”. Click “Next” to continue.
19. Check the summary. Click “Finish” to finally start the creation of the new Project Source.
20. After a successful configuration click “Close” to return to the Overview page of the Configuration Wizard.
21. Click “Exit” to close the Configuration Wizard.

Configure DSN to Infostore repository

As mentioned during the configuration of the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, a DSN to the existing Infostore repository is needed. The VoiceObjects Analyzer for MicroStrategy package requires a DSN named Infostore_WH. Follow the steps described below in order to create this DSN.
NOTE: Depending on your Windows operating system, the steps might slightly differ from the description!

1. Open the “Data Sources (ODBC)” window (Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC)).
2. Select the tab “System DSN”.
   
3. Click “Add” to create a new DSN
   NOTE: If no DSN´s are listed here (althoug one has already been created in the Intelligence Server configuration), this might indicate that you are running MicroStrategy 9 (32 bit software) on a 64 bit operating system. In this case you need to open the “ODBC Data Source Administrator” manually by starting the application [Windows]/SysWOW64/odbcad32.exe.
4. Select the driver that corresponds to your RDBMS containing the Infostore repository. Click “Finish” to continue.
5. CAUTION: Take care to use the name Infostore_WH for the new DSN, as otherwise the VoiceObjects Analyzer project cannot be connected to the data in your Infostore repository.
6. Follow the steps depending on the selected driver to properly define the connection to your Infostore repository.

Test of MicroStrategy Configuration

Once the DSN to the Infostore repository has been created successfully, you can test your setup by doing the following:

1. Open the MicroStrategy Desktop (Start -> All Programs -> MicroStrategy -> Desktop -> Desktop).
2. Provide the login details as defined in the Intelligence Server configuration (default is Administrator and empty password).
3. Open the Project Source “VoiceObjects Analyzer” (or any other name you have defined in the Project Source creation process).
4. Open the project “VoiceObjects Analyzer v9 R1″.
5. Expand the folder “Data Explorer” -> “Application” -> “Site” and check if an entry “System” will be offered. If this is the case the connection to the Infostore repository is working.