What will be the fate of kimballgroup.com?

[kennethd]

Hello,

First, congratulations to everyone at Kimball Group on your retirement and thanks for all of the great work the rest of us can build upon.

I am two weeks into planning a DW/BI project at a company I joined ~9 mos. ago, and the Data Warehouse Toolkit has been immensely helpful in getting my head wrapped around the concepts of dimensional modeling. I am completely new to DW/BI but have 20 years experience programming, dba-ing, and sysadmin-ing, and a couple years struggling with creating BI reports from RDBSs. I am the sole developer on this project, which I am planning, leading, and implementing from infrastructure to schema design to ETL, and so on (we are looking to bring on an analyst to work with me, and business users are eager to participate, but the technical end is all mine).

So you can imagine how relieved I was when it occurred to me two days ago, "I wonder if anyone hosts a Kimball Group Forum?", and only then discovered the vast resources available at kimballgroup.com which I've been devouring ever since. You can also imagine the sense of impending loss when yesterday I came across Margy's retirement announcement from Oct. 2014.

With your upcoming retirement, are there plans to take down the site &/or the forums?

As an open question to the community: are there similar resources you would recommend?

Thanks again,
Kenneth

[Nancy Rinn]

Hi Kenneth,
Thank you for your kind words! Indeed, the Kimball Group will be retiring at the end of this month. A bittersweet event! A formal announcement is coming and will be posted on our website (www.kimballgroup.com) but be assured, the Kimball Group website will be maintained for at least the next few years. We will continue to provide free access to the most popular Design Tips and articles, plus the Toolkit’s tools/utilities and other existing resources. However, some very old and infrequently viewed content will be removed from our site.

Thanks for your interest!
Nancy Rinn
Communications Coordinator
Kimball Group

[Nancy Rinn]

Margy Ross (president of Kimball Group) recently responded to a similar post on the LinkedIn Kimball University Alumni Group.  I thought it may helpful for those who participate in the Kimball Forum as well:


While the Kimball Group will cease operations on Dec 31, the website will live on. Many items under Resources will remain, including the books' tools/utilities and most popular articles/Design Tips. As for the Forum, we hope to preserve it despite the 3rd party provider pelting you with ads.

Ralph and I are working on a new edition of The Kimball Group Reader to be published in Jan. Our website contained originally-published content dated back to 1995 (with outdated guidance, missing figures, etc.), so the updates should benefit readers. We've urged Wiley to offer a low-cost electronic version. Stay tuned.

Finally, Bob, Joy and I will continue to offer DW/BI consulting and education services, albeit it on a more part-time basis. Starting in 2016, we'll operate under our long-standing legal entities, DecisionWorks Consulting (Bob/me) and InfoDynamics (Joy).

I'll continue to send updates. Meanwhile, thanks for your support, both past and future.

Best,
Margy

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