SAP BusinessObjects Demos on YouTube…

I’m amazed at how easy it is to find information these days.  Today I decided to do a follow-up post based on my most recent WebIntelligence demo post.  After a little searching around and I found a number of demos that had been posted by David Collins Dixon onto Youtube.  David has written a number of books about the SAP Business Information Warehouse (or BW for short).

SAP Integration Demos

Here are the list of demos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/davidcollinsdixon

Crystal Reports Demo leveraging SAP Hierarchies (No AUDIO)

David does an especially nice job with the Crystal Reports demo and shows you how to use the Hierarchy Node so Crystal Reports can properly leverage your SAP Hierarchy definition.

Xcelsius Demos

There are also a couple of demos from the guys at Everything Xcelsius:
http://www.youtube.com/user/XcelsiusGurus

If you find any SAP BusinessObjects videos that you think others would benefit from, just add links to them in a posted comment.

«Good BI»

Cool Xcelsius Dashboards and Where to Find Them

They’ve Got Style

I continue to be amazed by the dashboards being developed by our customers and partners to meet on going business needs.  Across every industry and every organization, regardless of size, companies are able to consolidate information into a single, interactive dashboard view.  Customers constantly ask me for examples of what other organizations have done, so I decided it was time to assemble a list of the best Xcelsius websites with samples.

Some of my Favorites

1. My absolute favorite site is Inverra.  They are constantly updating their site with unique KPI centric examples.
   http://www.inverra.com/Dashboards/demos.htm
2. Analysis Factory.  Very professional graphics.  Their supply chain example is tops.
   http://www.analysisfactory.com/gallery.html
3. MyXcelsius Showcase.
   http://myxcelsius.com/showcase/
4. Everything Xcelsius
   http://everythingxcelsius.com/showcase
5. SAP SDN Xcelsius Samples. These samples are either from SAP or have been uploaded from customers.

   https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/xcelsius-samples

Dashboarding Ideas

Need to keep you finger on the pulse of the dashboarding scene?  Looking for great ideas around dashboards in general?  There is one website above all others that has great information about creating dashboards with both Xcelsius and non-Xcelsius based technologies.  The website is Dashboard Spy and I highly recommend you give it a look.
http://dashboardspy.com/

They also have a great list of dashboard screenshots that’s worth a look:
http://dashboardspy.com/screenshots.html

«Good BI»

Some controls on this presentation can’t be activated – Xcelsius! Help!

At SAP BusinessObjects I work in the role of a Solution Advisor and I have a collection of Xcelsius dashboard examples.  I also receive new Xcelsius models from my colleagues from time to time.  Several months ago I ran across a strange problem with my Xcelsius powerpoints.  When I moved documents from one machine to another I began having problems openning these powerpoints and viewing my Xcelsius models.

Can’t be Activated in Aggravating

When opening powerpoint, I would see the following Windows error:

Some Controls on the Presentation can't be activated. They might not be registered on this computer.

I was left wondering if this was a problem with the new Powerpoint 2007, so an incompatibility between Xcelsius 4.5 and 2008.  After some research and an excellent article from the Xcelsius Journal, I was relieved to find out it was neither.  It was all about the flash viewer within Powerpoint.

Solving This Devilish Problem

Although I had long since upgraded my flash player within my Firefox browser, Powerpoint continued to hold on to the old flash version.  Although I upgraded my flash player within Internet Explorer, Powerpoint didn’t seem to see it.  Instead it was still using an old flash player and therefore I continued to get the message:  Some controls on this presentation can’t be activated.  They might not be registered on this computer.   It was so frustrating.  Eventually I was forced to manually perform a flash uninstall and a fresh reinstall.

Uninstalling Your Flash Player

For additional details about uninstalling your flash player, I recommend you refer to this article: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

As a shortcut to the files referred to in this article, I have provided references to the Windows Uninstall programs here:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/current/uninstall_flash_player.exe

Next, you will need to launch Internet Explorer and go to the adobe website.
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

In some cases, you may want to manually download the installer for use offline.   Consider going to this site and downloading the flash player installer for manual installations.
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

Back Flashy Presentations

Now that you’ve upgraded the flash player referenced by Powerpoint, you can get back to viewing those flashy Xcelsius presentations.  In the future I would expect Microsoft and Adobe to fix this problem.  I hope I never have to see this message again:  Some controls on this presentation can’t be activated.  They might not be registered on this computer.

«Good BI»

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 Features

I haven’t seen a lot of information available that talks about what’s new in the release of the latest version, BusinessObjects XI 3.1, so I thought I would point out some of the highlights I’ve come across.  You may also want read the complete What’s New in BusinessObjects XI 3.1 guide from the website.

Release Highlights

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 is a release that is focused on bringing parity to our platform support for both Java and .NET.  In BusinessObjects XI 3.0 we did not provide a .NET version of our standard BI portal, InfoView.  In BusinessObjects XI 3.1 we have released a native .NET portal which has near parity with the Java version.  I say near parity, because there are a few things missing, namely:

• Encyclopedia
• Dashboard Builder
• Voyager
• BI Mobile
• Polestar

For companies who find comfort in an all Microsoft World, this release will be welcomed.  BusinessObjects XI 3.1 has added support for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Sharepoint Portal Server 2007.  (There is also Microsoft Active Directory Forest Support as well!)  If you are using the SAP Integration Kit, this is also now available on the .NET platform.

Web Application Container Service

One of the way in which BusinessObjects has been able to balance both rich feature sets and cross platform compatibility is through the introduction of a new server to the BusinessObjects Platform.  This service is called the WACS, Web Application Container Service, and is a java container.  What this allows BusinessObjects to do is to run existing java applications through the BusinessObjects framework.

Let me explain how this will work in practice.  The BusinessObjects Administration Console, the CMC, is written in Java.  Instead of rewritting this application in .NET, BusinessObjects simply added the WACS to the BusinessObjects service bus and will execute application via this service.  The beauty of this solution is that the .NET administrator never has to worry about it.  BusinessObjects manages everything.

What other Applications can use the WACS?

Besides the CMC, there are a number of other applications that could within the WACS.  This includes:

• Interactive DHTML Viewer for WebIntelligence
• Query as a Web Service (for supporting Xcelsius)
• LiveOffice

There is an important document that covers what is supported and what is not supported within the WACS framework.  In theory all native java-based aspects of the BusinessObjects application suite could be run through the WACS but the question is whether or not it is officially supported.  This document is called:  Web Application Container Server (WACS): Supported and Unsupported Features for BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1and it explains the details.  You can download it here.

Additional Platform Enhancements

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 supports IPv6 100% across the product suite (except for Desktop Intelligence).  They have also added their first native 64-bit architecture.  Since BusinessObjects XIr2 SP3, the platform has been able to run on 64-bit operating systems however the platform still runs as a 32-bit application.  The first native 64-bit release is an the HP-UX IA-64 Itanium hardware.

Life Cycle Manager

Life Cycle Manager, LCM for short, s a web-based utility that allows the administrator to:

• Promote BI content from one system to another (without affecting the dependencies of the content)
• Manage dependencies of BI content
• Manage different versions of BI content
• Roll back (yahoo!) promoted BI content

This tool does not install with the platform, but is a separate install.

“So isn’t that what the Import Wizard is for?”, you may be asking?  Well, certainly the import wizard has been used to provide this type of functionality in the past – especially with the introduction of BIAR files in BusinessObjects XI; however I think you’ll see from the list of features in LCM, it is better to have a specialized tool for the LCM process.

Life Cycle Manager provides a number of features over the Import Wizard (besides rollback) including:

• Granular control over the objects selected (yes, we trust you)
• Scheduling Promotions Jobs (a job is a collection of BI content or InfoObjects to be precise)
• Integrated Version Control (via Subversion)
• Database connection overrides and mapping (Tired of changing database connection strings?)
• Auditing
• The ability to “preview” to changes before committing them
• Rollback, Did I mention rollback?

There is a new LCM Job server which has been added to the platform to manage the promotion process.

Have you ever created a BIAR file and realized you missed a file?  Now with LCM you can save your Promotion job and use it to generate a BIAR file.  If you find that something is missing, you can simply open up the promotion job , select the missing objects and regenerate the BIAR file.

BIAR ≠ BIAR

When is a BIAR file not a BIAR file?  Well, with the LCM tool, the BIAR files which are generated by the LCM tool are LCMBIAR files.  As the name indicates, the LCMBIAR files are NOT compatible with the BIAR files used with the Import Wizard.  Bummer.

Voyager

Voyager was the other biggie.  A lot of work was put into providing interface enhancements and increased performance.  This is probably the last release before the eagerly anticipated release of “Pioneer” in 2009, which will combine Voyager’s intuitive user interface with the powerful OLAP capabilities of the BEx OLAP tools.

Voyager now has a number of new visualizations including Box-Plot, Scatter, Bubble and Radar charts.    There are also a number of features that were in OLAP Intelligence, which were missing in earlier versions of Voyager, namely, Exception highlighting, URL Linking to other BI Content and Favorite Groups.

Have you ever made a mistake when building a Voyager workspace?  Well, now you have full undo/redo capabilities.  After being so used to the undo/redo capabilities in WebIntelligence, I always found the missing feature extremely annoying and I’m sure other did to.

Fly Over Of Additional Features

Rather than talk about additional features in detail, I thought I would briefly mention some of them here and perhaps in the future I can blog about them in detail if there is interest.

Semantic Layer -Support for BEGIN_SQL, Prompt support for codes AND descriptions.

Crystal Reports – Dual Monitor support, flash printing to PDF.

WebIntelligence -Support for Extension Points, Auto-Save, RelativeValue(), Multi-Pass Bursting

SAP Integration – SNC for BusinessObjects Universes (Prior to XI 3.1, this was only available for Crystal Reports), Improve Prompt Support for Hierarchy and Hierarchy Node dependencies.

Dashboard Builder – Printing, Interportlet Communication

Summary

There are some good things that have come out in this latest release.  This release is also the latest ‘reset point’ for BusinessObjects XI 3.X maintenance, so you can expect fix packs for XI 3.0 to no longer be released.

Hope you found this information useful.  I’ve tried to keep it short and sweet.

«Good BI»

Xcelsius 2008 and Refresh On Load

Are you used to the new Xcelsius 2008 yet?  The release of SP1 has definately been a big improvement.  Like many others, I struggled with the new and improved Xcelsius.  There were a few too many quirks for me and until the release of SP1, I went back to Xcelsius 4.5.

Besides the fact that there are several “little things” that work differently between Xcelsius 2008 and 4.5, I did notice a couple of bigger things.  One in particular was the Refresh on Load feature.  I found that there was a big difference between setting the data connection to refresh on open and setting the Connection Refresh button to refresh on load.

Although I did discover a whitepaper that eventually explained it all to me, I ended up figuring this one out on my own.  I should have asked myself early on why there was a ‘refresh on open’ on both the data connection AND the connection refresh.

Data Connection – Refresh on Load

When the SWF file is launched, data is retrieved from the spreadsheet and any data connections, and then dashboard components are generated.  The Refresh On Load option forces the Data Connection to retrieve data from the source before the components are generated.

What’s the downside? The downside I discovered is that you cannot use values from the controls within the Xcelsius model to drive the prompts in your web services because in reality, the controls haven’t been ‘created’ yet.  I found that even though I had default values of “All” hard-coded in my model, I could NOT get my web services queries to fire.  Instead I would get the message:  All prompts are not filled.

In order to avoid this message, you can NOT refresh the data connection on open.  Instead you much create a connection refresh as an object on your Xcelsius model.

Connection Refresh – Refresh on Load

Connection Refresh works like it did in Xcelsius 4.5.  I wrongly assumed that I would no longer need to use a connection refresh in Xcelsius 2008, but due to the issue of not being able to set values for prompts, I found they were still necessary.

BUG?  I’m not sure if it’s a bug, but I also found that if I evoke the dynamic visibility on a Connection Refresh and the object is hidden, then the refresh on open does not work.

Here is an example (the connection refresh buttons are hidden)

Then the user clicks on the setup icon and they are exposed

From a demonstration perspective, I like to hide my Connection Refresh buttons and only display them once the user clicks in a specific area to view them.  In my case I was unable to get the refresh on open to fire on a Connection Refresh if at the time the model was opened, the object was hidden.

NOTE:  To work around this bug, I added a “transparent” button at the top of my model which was NOT hidden.  It was transparent the user could not see it.   When the model opened, the transparent CR button refreshed my web services.  This allowed me to keep my buttons “hidden” but get past the refresh bug.

Final Alternative

Creating an extra step in the lookup logic will make it possible for you to be able to use the data connection – refresh on load AND have the prompts work correctly.  Instead of having the prompt use the target cell of a selector (e.g. B2) , create a second cell that says:  =IF(ISBLANK(B2), “Default Value”, B2) and have the prompt use it instead.  This way, even if the selector value is blank, because the object has not yet been created, the prompt will always have a valid value.

Click here to download sample. BTW,I did not include the database and web service for this sample.

In Crystal Xcelsius 4.5, I was so accustomed to having my web service query prompts feed from the target cells, that it took me a little while to realized that this formula would fix the problem as well.

Summary

Based upon these findings, here are my thoughts:

• If you want the model to come up faster (before the data has been retrieved), then always use a connection refresh – refresh on open.
• If you want to model to have the latest data at the time it opens, then always use a data connection – refresh on open.

In general, my personal preference is to use the connection refresh because I think it’s better to allow the user to see the model as soon as possible and then wait for the refresh of the data.  I also like it because it means i don’t have to update my old Xcelsius 4.5 models to use the interim calculation I describe above.

Again, here is the whitepaper just in case you want to read the full details.

Hope this helps you as much as it helped me.

«Good BI»