Tag Archives: Oracle BI Suite EE

OBIEE12c – Three Months In, What’s the Verdict?

I’m over in Redwood Shores, California this week for the BIWA Summit 2016 conference where I’ll be speaking about BI and analytics development on Oracle’s database and Hadoop platforms. As it’s around three months now since OBIEE12c came out and we were here for Openworld, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to reflect on how OBIEE12c has been received by ourselves, the partner community and of course by customers. Given OBIEE11g was with us for around five years it’s still early days in the overall lifecycle of this release, but it’s also interesting to compare back to where we were around the same time with 11g and see if we can spot any similarities and differences to take-up then.

Starting with the positives; Visual Analyzer (note – not the Data Visualization option, I’ll get to that later) has gone down well with customers at least over in the UK. The major selling point seems to be “Tableau with a shared governed data model and integrated with the rest of our BI platform” (see Oracle’s slide from Oracle Openworld 2015 below), and given that the DV option’s price point per named-used seems to be comparable with Tableau server the cost-savings in terms of not having to learn and support a new platform means that customers seem pleased this new feature is now available.

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Given that VA is an extra-cost option what I’m seeing is customers planning to upgrade their base OBIEE platform from 11g to 12c as part of their regular platform refresh schedule, and then postponing the VA part until after the upgrade and as part of a separate cost/benefit exercise. But VA seems to be the trigger for customers to start considering an upgrade now, with the business typically now holding the budget for BI and Visual Analyzer (like Mobile with 11g) being the new capability that unlocks the upgrade spend.

On the negative side, Oracle charging for VA hasn’t gone down well, either from the customer side who ask what it is they actually get for their 22% upgrade and maintenance fee if they they have to pay for anything new that comes with the upgrade; or from partners who now see little in the 12c release to incentivise customers to upgrade that’s not an additional cost option. My response is usually to point to previous releases – 11g with Scorecards and Mobile, the database with In-Memory, RAC and so on – and say that it’s always the case that anything net-new comes at extra cost, whereas the upgrade should be something you do anyway to keep the platform up-to-date and be prepared to uptake new features. My observation over the past month or so is that this objection seems to be going away as people get used to the fact that VA costs extra; the other push-back I get a lot is from IT who don’t want to introduce data mashups into their environment, partly I guess out of fear of the unknown but also partly because of concerns around governance, how well it’ll work in the real world, so on and so on. I’d say overall VA has gone down well at least once we got past the “shock” of it costing extra, I’d expect there’ll be some bundle along the lines of BI Foundation Suite (BI Foundation Suite Plus?) in the next year or so that’ll bundle BIF with the DV option, maybe include some upcoming features in 12c that aren’t exposed yet but might round out the release. We’ll see.

The other area where OBIEE12c has gone down well, surprisingly well, is with the IT department for the new back-end features. I’ve been telling people that whilst everyone thinks 12c is about the new front-end features (VA, new look-and-feel etc) it’s actually the back-end that has the most changes, and will lead to the most financial and cost-saving benefits to customers – again note the slide below from last year’s Openworld summarising these improvements.

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Simplifying install, cloning, dev-to-test and so on will make BI provisioning considerably faster and cheaper to do, whilst the introduction of new concepts such as BI Modules, Service Instances, layered RPD customizations and BAR files paves the way for private cloud-style hosting of multiple BI applications on a single OBIEE12c domain, hybrid cloud deployments and mass customisation of hosted BI environments similar to what we’ve seen with Oracle Database over the past few years.

What’s interesting with 12c at this point though is that these back-end features are only half-deployed within the platform; the lack of a proper RPD upload tool, BI Modules and Services Instances only being in the singular and so on point to a future release where all this functionality gets rounded-off and fully realised in the platform, so where we are now is that 12c seems oddly half-finished and over-complicated for what it is, but it’s what’s coming over the rest of the lifecycle that will make this part of the product most interesting – see the slide below from Openworld 2014 where this full vision was set-out, but in Openworld this year was presumably left-out of the launch slides as the initial release only included the foundation and not the full capability.

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Compared back to where we were with OBIEE11g (11.1.1.3, at the start of the product cycle) which was largely feature-complete but had significant product quality issues, with 12c we’ve got less of the platform built-out but (with a couple of notable exceptions) generally good product quality, but this half-completed nature of the back-end must confuse some customers and partners who aren’t really aware of the full vision for the platform.

And finally, cloud; BICS had an update some while ago where it gained Visual Analyzer and data mashups earlier than the on-premise release, and as I covered in my recent UKOUG Tech’15 conference presentation it’s now possible to upload an on-premise RPD (but not the accompanying catalog, yet) and run it in BICS, giving you the benefit of immediate availability of VA and data mashups without having to do a full platform upgrade to 12c.

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In-practice there are still some significant blockers for customers looking to move their BI platform wholesale into Oracle Cloud; there’s no ability yet to link your on-premise Active Directory or other security setup to BICS meaning that you need to recreate all your users as Oracle Cloud users, and there’s very limited support for multiple subject areas, access to on-premise data sources and other more “enterprise” characterises of an Oracle BI platform. And Data Visualisation Cloud Service (DVCS) has so far been a non-event; for partners the question is why would we get involved and sell this given the very low cost and the lack of any area we can really add value, while for customers it’s perceived as interesting but too limited to be of any real practical use. Of course, over the long term this is the future – I expect on-premise installs of OBIEE will be the exception rather than the rule in 5 or 10 years time – but for now Cloud is more “one to monitor for the future” rather than something to plan for now, as we’re doing with 12c upgrades and new implementations.

So in summary, I’d say with OBIEE12c we were pleased and surprised to see it out so early, and VA in-particular has driven a lot of interest and awareness from customers that has manifested itself in enquires around upgrades and new features presentations. The back-end for me is the most interesting new part of the release, promising significant time-saving and quality-improving benefits for the IT department, but at present these benefits are more theoretical than realisable until such time as the full BI Modules/multiple Services Instances feature is rolled-out later this year or next. Cloud is still “one for the future” but there’s significant interest from customers in moving either part or all of their BI platform to the cloud, but given the enterprise nature of OBIEE it’s likely BI will follow after a wider adoption of Oracle Cloud for the customer rather than being the trailblazer given the need to integrate with cloud security, data sources and the need to wait for some other product enhancements to match on-premise functionality.

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Becky’s BI Apps Corner: Oracle BI Applications, where art thou?

Hello! I would like to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Becky Wagner and I’ve been working with Rittman Mead America since the beginning of the year. I have a background in data warehousing and ETL with a state government agency, where I was part of a project upgrading from DataStage to ODI 11g with Oracle Golden Gate in Oracle’s early adopter program for Oracle BI Apps 11g. Since coming to Rittman Mead, I’ve taught several ODI 12c bootcamps, designed and delivered custom trainings for BI Apps and ODI and been involved in ODI 11g, ODI 12c projects, and OBIA 11g projects.

 

Recently, I was putting together a BI Apps for Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) custom training for a client who is upgrading BI Apps and will be using ODI for the first time. On the Virtual Machine I was building for the training, I wanted the version of Oracle BI Applications to match the client’s installation. I found that Oracle’s recent website facelifts changed the way I was used to getting older versions of software. Oracle’s Downloads and Technetwork sites both have the most recent version of Oracle BI Apps available (currently 11.1.1.10.1) but no earlier versions any longer. Edelivery has the earlier versions as well as the current version, but the site has changed enough that it took me a bit to understand how to get to the Oracle BI Apps software files to download.

 

Downloading Oracle BI Apps from Edelivery

 

From your favorite browser, go to https://edelivery.oracle.com and sign in.

Accept the Export Restrictions (of course, only after you have read, understand and agree to them.)

 

Fill in the Product* box with ‘Business Intelligence Applications’. You won’t see Business Intelligence Applications in the dropdown that appears as you start typing. What you do see are other Products that your company would have purchased to allow you to have a license of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, such as Oracle Financial Analytics or Oracle Human Resources Analytics. Select the product (or one of the products) that was purchased by your company.

Click on the Select Platform button and check the box for your appropriate platform, such as Linux x86-64 or Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit). Then click the Select button.

Once the Product you selected is displaying in the window, click on the Continue button.

 

Now Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.10.1 is showing. Interestingly, it doesn’t say Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, but currently OBIEE doesn’t have a version of 11.1.1.10.1, so we can be confident this is actually Oracle BI Apps. However, this still isn’t the Oracle BI Apps that you are looking for. Below the Available Release, you will see the option to Select Alternate Release.

This will allow you to drop down the box to select an earlier version.

With any version of Oracle BI Apps, there are several different components to download, which you can see by clicking on the triangle to the left of the Available Release. Once you have selected your desired version of Oracle BI Apps, click on the continue button to begin the download.

Please don’t forget to read the license agreements carefully and if you agree, check the box and click Continue.

 

At this point, you can now see the files to download. You can click on each blue link individually, or click the Download All button to use Oracle’s downloader tool. Also, for the Linux, Red Hat, and Solaris folks, notice at the bottom the WGET Options.

Downloading ODI for Oracle BI Apps from Edelivery

 

Get the downloads started for these files. We aren’t quite finished yet, though. ODI needs to be downloaded as well. Return to the Products page. Please note that to get the correct version of ODI, you must type in ‘Oracle Data Integrator for Oracle Business Intelligence’ (again, it probably means Oracle BI Apps, but points here for consistency at least). Select a Platform. Then click Continue.

Notice we are showing Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.10.1 again. You will want to click on Select Alternate Release, and pick the same version you selected above. This will save you from interesting OPatch errors later during the install process, but I will leave those fun errors for another blog post. Then click Continue.

Rinse and repeat.

And that is how you navigate the new Oracle EDelivery site to get Oracle BI Apps download files and previous versions. I would love to hear your thoughts if you found this helpful or confusing. Also, please leave comments below if you found other alternatives for downloading earlier versions of Oracle BI Apps, and/or your suggestions for ways to rename the V#####-##.zip files to something more descriptive that better identifies the zip file. Keep an eye out for more Becky’s BI Apps Corner coming soon and if you’re interested in OBIEE or ODI training (or even a custom Oracle BI Applications course), give us a shout at training@rittmanmead.com!

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An Alternative Front-End for OBIEE using Web Services and d3

Working with OBIEE, it is common to get reequests to add visualisations or otherwise improve the UI. Typically this has been done by using narrative views to embed HTML and Javascript to provide data driven, custom visualisations. To cope with the former, Tom Underhill developed the Rittman Mead Visual Plugin Pack (RMVPP), a web based plugin to allow configurable visualisations to work natively in OBIEE through the use of narratives. This technology is uses configurable Javascript templates for each plugin. Each plugin has a render function which will receive the dataset from OBIEE as well as any associated information. The features of the plugin are then only limited by the ability of the JS developer and current web standards. Plugin developers could be further aided by sharing common functions for display and data manipulation, and external libraries can be included simply.

RMVPP

Above shows the process of creating a Sankey diagram using the RMVPP framework. The code then produces the corresponding narrative required to generate this visualisation automatically.

When RMVPP was being developed by Tom, I was investigating the use of web services in OBIEE. Several of us at Rittman Mead had used the exposed web services to interface with OBIEE to automate various tasks programmatically, such as regression testing and web catalogue auditing. A client had a requirement to execute an OBIEE query on a webpage outside of the OBIEE front end in order to power a fairly sophisticated 3JS application that was not rendering within OBIEE (via a narrative). It appeared that the shortcomings were due to attempting to render the WebGL within the complex div and table structure of an OBIEE page. Soon, I was able to use the web services client side, in Javascript (so long as the page was hosted on the same server as OBIEE) as opposed to server side in Python or similar. Combining this breakthrough with Tom’s RMVPP framework seemed like the next logical step – as it would allow us to totally modify the OBIEE front end whilst retaining the benefits of using the BI Server like security and physical query generation.

An Alternative Front-end for OBIEE

The following section will describe and show some of the features I have developed in my alternative to the OBIEE front end. It uses the plugin framework from RMVPP but with a custom interface that works differently to OBIEE.

Creating a Visualisation

Below is a screencapture showing creation of a basic bar chart.

Creating Visualisations

The column mapping tab is configurable by the plugin developer and specifies the parameters that each visualisation will use. As a user, OBIEE presentation columns (displayed on the left) are mapped into these parameters. A flag can be set on a parameter to allow multiple columns to be chosen for that parameter. The plugin developer can then use the resulting data set accordingly. The columns selected here are effectively the Criteria from vanilla OBIEE as they determine which columns are used in the logical SQL. The parameter mapping allow the developer to use the correct columns from the data set in the render function.

The configuration screen shown there is customisable by the plugin designer, allowing developers to specify a list of options and UI elements that get fed back into the render function for the visualisation. UI options include:

  • Textboxes
  • Dropdowns
  • Radio Buttons
  • Colour Pickers

Filtering

The next screen capture shows a Sankey chart and applies a filter to the query. The filter mechanism also has an sub search facility similar to vanilla OBIEE.

Sankey & Filtering

Conditional Formatting

The next example shows a pivot table being created and the conditional formatting functionality available.

Conditional Formatting

The conditional format tab allows you to choose the columns to apply formatting to as well as the formatting rule that should be applied. Additionally, a plugin developer can specify custom conditional formats to be available for specific plugins. The heatmap formatting style is one such example for the pivot table.

Adding and Editing Columns

Similar to vanilla OBIEE, columns formats and formulae can be edited and added for visualisations.

New Column

Saving/Loading

Visualisations (and dashboard pages) can be saved and loaded to and from the web catalogue. This means that security can be applied to them in the normal way.

Save & Load

They are saved to OBIEE as analyses with Static Text views in them containing the necessary information to build the visualisation with my API. OBIEE however, will not be able to render these properly and I’ve stopped developing that functionality for a number of reasons I won’t go into in this post. The screencapture shows a brief glimpse of the webcat explorer in my app, which is basic, but filters out any vanilla OBIEE objects, only allowing you to view and open custom objects that were created by the app.

Dashboards

The interface allows the user to create dashboards from the same app, without having to save individual visualisations first.

Dashboards

After creating and configuring a visualisation, they can be temporarily stored. Once stored, the user can switch to dashboard mode, which will have a blank canvas, allowing the user to add any stored visaulisations. The edit button in dashboard mode will allow visualisations to be freely placed on the canvas.

Interactions

The interactivity framework is probably the feature with the biggest benefit over the vanilla system that I’ve added.

Interactivity

Plugin developers are able to create triggers as part of their visualisations. These triggers can be fired in most situations and tied to the data so that dynamic interactions between visualisations are possible. Users can specify what data should be passed to the target reaction. By default, every plugin can be hard filtered by an interaction, which modifies the query and goes back to the BI server. Plugin developers can also write their own reactions, allowing for interactivity only limited by the plugin designer’s web development capability.

Drilldowns

Drilldowns between custom dashboard pages can be defined using the same framework as the other interactions.

Drilldowns

Users need only enter the webcat path for the target page in order for the drilldown to function. Each visualisation of the target dashboard will be automatically filtered (if the subject area matches) on the criteria specified by the interaction.

Dashboard Prompts

Some of the vanilla features in OBIEE are very useful, so I replicated the functionality in my app.

Dashboard Prompts

This shows the implementation of prompts to a dashboard page. Unlike OBIEE, it is not required to set an ‘is prompted’ filter on each target. Rather, the prompt will automatically filter any visualisations on the page that are from the same subject area.

Column Selectors

Column selectors can be added as either dropdowns or radio buttons.

Column Selector

The user chooses an array of columns to be in the column selector. If any visualisations in the dashboard contain a column in this array, it will be swapped when the column selector is updated.

Map Visualisations

Two of the visualisation plugins I have made are map based, for geographical data.

maps

Both use LeafletJS, an open source Javascript mapping library. The first, is a bubble chart which relies on longitude and latitude being stored in the database and exposed via OBIEE. The second is a choropleth which requires a TopoJSON file of the regions in order to function. Additionally, the json file needs to have an attribute attached to each region which will act as a key to join it onto OBIEE data. So that region attribute needs to have a matching key exposed via OBIEE.

Summary

So that wraps up the major features of the app. I don’t know if it’s going to be useful, if there’s any mileage in further development or any of that, but was an interesting PoC while it lasted. If anyone has any comments, ideas, features or just want to know more about the app and how it works, feel free to comment.

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Driving OBIEE User Engagement with Enhanced Usage Tracking for OBIEE

Measuring and monitoring user interactions and behaviour with OBIEE is a key part of Rittman Mead’s User Engagement Service. By understanding and proving how users are engaging the system we can improve the experience for the user, driving up usage and ensuring maximum value for your OBIEE investment. To date, we have had the excellent option of Usage Tracking for finding out about system usage, but this only captures actual dashboard and analysis executions. What I am going to discuss in this article is taking Usage Tracking a step further, and capturing and analysing every click that that the user makes. Every login, every search, every report build action. This can be logged to a database such as Oracle, and gives us Enhanced Usage Tracking!

Why?

Because the more we understand about our user base, the more we can do for them in terms of improved content and accessibility, and the more we can do for us, the OBIEE dev/sysadmin, in terms of easier maintenance and better knowledge of the platform for which we are developing.

Here is a handful of questions that this data can answer – I’m sure once you see the potential of the data you will be able to think of plenty more…

How many users are accessing OBIEE through a mobile device?

Maybe you’re about to implement a mobile strategy, perhaps deploying MAD or rolling out BI Mobile HD. Wouldn’t it be great if you could quantify its uptake, and not only that but the impact that the provision of mobile makes on the general user engagement levels of your OBIEE user base?

Perhaps you think your users might benefit from a dedicated Mobile OBIEE strategy, but to back up your business case for the investment in mobile licences or time to optimise content for mobile consumption you want to show how many users are currently accessing full OBIEE through a web browser on their mobile device. And not only ‘a mobile device’, but which one, which browser, and which OS. Enhanced Usage Tracking data can provide all this, and more.

Which dashboards get exported to Excel the most frequently?

The risks that Excel-marts present are commonly discussed, and broader solutions such as data-mashup capabilities within OBIEE itself exist – but how do you identify which dashboards are frequently exported from OBIEE to Excel, and by whom? We’ve all probably got a gut-instinct, or indirect evidence, of when this happens – but now we can know for sure. Whilst Usage Tracking alone will tell us when a dashboard is run, only Enhanced Usage Tracking can show what the user then did with the results:

What do we do with this information? It Depends, of course. In some cases exporting data to Excel is a – potentially undesirable but pragmatic – way of getting certain analysis done, and to try to prevent it unnecessarily petulant and counterproductive. In many other cases though, people use it simply as a way of doing something that could be done in OBIEE but they lack the awareness or training in order to do it. The point is that by quantifying and identifying when it occurs you can start an informed discussion with your user base, from which both sides of the discussion benefit.

Precise Tracking of Dashboard Usage

Usage Tracking is great, but it has limitations. One example of this is where a user visits a dashboard page more than once in the same session, meaning that it may be served from the Presentation Services cache, and if that happens, the additional visit won’t be recorded in Usage Tracking. By using click data we can actually track every single visit to a dashboard.

In this example here we can see a user visiting two dashboard pages, and then going back to the first one – which is captured by the Enhanced Usage Tracking, but not the standard one, which only captures the first two dashboard visits:

This kind of thing can matter, both from an audit point of view, but also a more advanced use, where we can examine user behaviour in repeated visits to a dashboard. For example, does it highlight that a dashboard design is not optimal and the user is having to switch between multiple tabs to build up a complete picture of the data that they are analysing?

Predictive Modelling to Identify Users at Risk of ‘Churn’

Churn is when users disengage from a system, when they stop coming back. Being able to identify those at risk of doing this before they do it can be hugely valuable, because it gives you opportunity to prevent it. By analysing the patterns of system usage in OBIEE and looking at users who have stopped using OBIEE (i.e. churned) we can then build a predictive model to identify those with similar patterns of usage but are still active.

Measures such as the length of time it takes to run the first dashboard after login, or how many dashboards are run, or how long it takes to find data when building an analysis, can all be useful factors to include in the model.

Are any of my users still accessing OBIEE through IE6?

A trend that I’ve seen in the years working with OBIEE is that organisations are [finally] moving to a more tolerant view on web browsers other than IE. I suppose this is as the web application world evolves and IE becomes more standards compliant and/or web application functionality forces organisations to adopt browsers that provide the latest capabilities. OBIEE too, is a lot better nowadays at not throwing its toys out of the pram when run on a browser that happens to have been written within the past decade.

What’s my little tirade got to do with enhanced usage tracking? Because as those responsible for the development and support of OBIEE in an organisation we need to have a clear picture of the user base that we’re supporting. Sure, corporate ‘standard’ is IE9, but we all know that Jim in design runs one of those funny Mac things with Safari, Fred in accounts insists on Firefox, Bob in IT prides himself on running Konquerer, and it would be a cold day in hell before you prise the MD’s copy of IE5 off his machine. Whether these browsers are “supported” or not is only really a secondary point to whether they’re being used. A lot of the time organisations will take the risk on running unsupported configurations, consciously or in blissful ignorance, and being ‘right’ won’t cut it if your OBIEE patch suddenly breaks everything for them.

Enhanced Usage Tracking gives us the ability to analyse browser usage over time:

as well as the Enhanced Usage Tracking data rendered through OBIEE itself, showing browser usage in total (nb the Log scale):

It’s also easy to report on the Operating System that users have:

Where are my users connecting to OBIEE from?

Whilst a lot of OBIEE deployments are run within the confines of a corporate network, there are those that are public-facing, and for these ones it could be interesting to include location as another dimension by which we analyse the user base and their patterns of usage. Enhanced Usage Tracking includes the capture of a user’s IP, which for public networks we can easily lookup and use the resulting data in our analysis.

Even on a corporate network the user’s IP can be useful, because the corporate network will be divided into subnets and IP ranges, which will usually have geographical association to them – you just might need to code your own lookup in order to translate 192.168.11.5 to “Bob’s dining room”.

Who deleted this report? Who logged in? Who clicked the Do Not Click Button?

The uses for Enhanced Usage Tracking are almost endless. Any user interaction with OBIEE can now be measured and monitored.

A frequent question that I see on the OTN forums is along the lines of “for audit purposes, we need to know who logged in”. Since Usage Tracking alone won’t capture this directly (although the new init block logging in > 11.1.1.9 probably helps indirectly with this) this information usually isn’t available….until now! In this table we see the user, their session ID, and the time at which they logged in:

What about who updated a report last, or deleted it? We can find that out too! This simple example shows some of the operations in the Presentation Catalog recorded as clear as day in Enhanced Usage Tracking:

Want to know more? We’d love to tell you more!

Measuring and monitoring user interactions and behaviour with OBIEE is a key part of Rittman Mead’s User Engagement Service. By understanding and proving how users are engaging the system we can improve the experience for the user, driving up usage and ensuring maximum value for your OBIEE investment.

If you’d like to find out more, including about Enhanced Usage Tracking and getting a free User Engagement Report for your OBIEE system, get in touch now!

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Rittman Mead at UKOUG Tech’15 Conference, Birmingham

This week Rittman Mead are very pleased to be presenting at the UK Oracle User Group’s Tech’15 Conference in Birmingham, delivering a number of sessions around OBIEE, Data Integration, Cloud and Big Data.

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If you’re at the event and you see any of us in sessions, around the conference or during our talks, we’d be pleased to speak with you about your projects and answer any questions you might have. Here’s the list our speaking slots over the four days of the event, and I’ll update the list with links to presentation downloads as they become available over the event.

In addition, if you’re interested in the OBIEE user adoption and retention area that Robin talks about in his Wednesday session, Rittman Mead have a User Engagement service using some of the tools and techniques that Robin talked about (datasheet here) and we’d be pleased to talk to you about how you can increase user engagement, adoption and retention for your OBIEE system. Other than that, come and speak to us if you see us at the Birmingham ICC, and look forward to more content on these areas in the New Year!

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