A Q&A with Dashboards in SAP BI

A Q&A with Dashboards in SAP BI
After returning from the SAPInsider BI2015 event in Las Vegas, I wrote a blog on my personal
experiences from the perspective of a presenter, sponsor and exhibitor. That blog, hopefully, will be
posted very soon. The two days that I was there were certainly intense. During the course of my time
at BI2015, I gave a session on building Executive Level Dashboards using SAP Dashboards. We had some
very interesting questions about name clarification, tool selection and longevity of the tool. I wanted to
give some interesting questions posed by the attendees of my sessions and give my thoughts on them.
Question: SAP Dashboards means Xcelsius and not Design Studio?
My Response: When the SAP BI Platform 4.0 was released, SAP renamed a few of their tools. The
InfoView portal from prior versions of SAP BusinessObjects was renamed to LaunchPad. SAP attempted
to rename Web Intelligence as Interactive Analysis and even went as far as updating the support site
and documentation as Interactive Analysis or IA. After some rebellion, SAP kept the original Web
Intelligence name (but didn’t change the support site or document references!).
The professionally authored dashboarding product Xcelsius was renamed to SAP BusinessObjects
Dashboards. Colloquially, Dashboards is still referred to as Xcelsius. So when we mention Dashboards
(which can also refer to the generic dashboarding term), we mean the former Xcelsius application.
When we say Xcelsius, we mean SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.
One gentleman stayed for my entire Xcelsius session and posed this question at the end. I’m very happy
that he stuck around to hear about Xcelsius and referred him to the Design Studio sessions in the BI2015
schedule.
Question: I heard that Xcelsius / Dashboards are dying. Is that true?
My Response: Well, yes and no. SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is the next generation of
Dashboards / Xcelsius in the SAP stack. The roadmap from SAP has always pointed to the convergence
of the two tools with Design Studio being the surviving tool. This means that any Dashboards / Xcelsius
files that you create should be rolled into a Design Studio application. Personally I have not seen SAP’s
plans for the migration of an XLF file into a Design Studio application but am told that they’re still
converging.
My advice is that if you’re new to the professionally authored dashboarding space in the SAP stack; learn
more about Design Studio (sap.com/learnbi). If you have existing Dashboards / Xcelsius dashboards in
play, you will still be able to use them. However, in my personal opinion, you may consider a project
whereby those dashboards are rebuilt into Design Studio. If it’s too big of an undertaking, continue to
use the dashboards until SAP responds to their convergence statement.
Question: What’s going on with Live Office? Can it still be used in Dashboards?
My Response: Yes! SAP BusinessObjects Live Office is a plugin for Microsoft Office that allows users to
pull in universe queries as well as Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports content as live data inside of
Microsoft Office tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you embed data through Live Office into
an Excel spreadsheet then import that spreadsheet into the Dashboards application (the former Xcelsius
application, NOT Design Studio), you can use the Data Connection Manager to control the Live Office
connections.
One word of warning: In my experience, Live Office can be problematic and frustrating when used with
Dashboards. While it does provide you with a live version of the data, I’ve had issues where data
connections just suddenly dropped, produced error messages or even corrupted dashboards files (the
XLF file type). There are other methods that provide more reliable connectivity (i.e. BI Services / Query
as a Web Service and Direct Binding from Universe or BEx queries).
According to the SAP roadmap for Live Office, it’s functionality will eventually be rolled into the Analysis
for Office plugin so Live Office may eventually become incompatible with Dashboards because Analysis
for Office worksheets are not supported by the Dashboards tool.
In closing, you can see that in my sessions, I don’t provide just processes, tips and tricks on using
Dashboards / Xcelsius, but I also try to provide some context to help you make better decisions on the
direction of analytics within your organization. I hope my answers to these common questions will help
you decide whether Dashboards or Design Studio is in your future!
Chris Hickman, Consulting Manager
Decision First Technologies
[email protected]
twitter @Chickman72
Chris is a certified SAP BusinessObjects consultant. His specific areas of expertise include reporting,
analysis, dashboard development and visualization techniques. Chris' software development
background has enabled him to achieve proven effectiveness in architecting, developing, testing and
supporting both desktop and web-based applications for many customer engagements representing
various industries. Chris also speaks globally at SAP and ASUG events.