Finally GA! For weeks there has been announcements all over Twitter that the Xcelsius 2008 Service Pack 5 (SP5) with support for Windows 7 and Office 2010 (32-bit) was available on the Service Marketplace. Today we were notified that SAP has made it generally available on its new product updates site: http://bit.ly/xgnFt1 (see the official announcement from [...]
Welcome to my first post on Everything Xcelsius. I’m Leonid Koyfman, a Database Architect at AKQA in San Francisco. Although my primary responsibilities are in a database domain, data visualization and dashboard design in particular have always been in the area of my interests. In my career I completed many reporting projects using Crystal Reports, Actuate and [...]
A few months ago, I received an email with a subject, “check out this print component” from Gabriel Braun at DataSavvy Tools. When I fired it up, I had a smile ear-to-ear because I was sitting in front of exactly what every customer has been asking me for the last 5 years… A robust print [...]
As I attempt to describe in the below figure, there are a few types of BI that are currently available from BI vendors. Historically, most BI deployments began with pure reporting that delivered information to those who needed it for making decisions. Those reports were either printed or delivered electronically via email or a portal. [...]
Crystal Reports began in 1988 under the name of Quik Reports DOS. It was created out of necessity, as the original developers needed a better tool for generating views of the data contained within their accounting application. Through the years, the product has been integrated into many applications and development environments, but has remained a [...]
Hi Folks, The most anticipated event of the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects conference is finally here and its BIGGER and BETTER! We are excited to formally announce the Official SAP BI4 Release Party (aka the 3rd Annual Xcelsius Gurus Reception), hosted by none other than myself Mico Yuk (founder of Benchmarkers.com and EverythingXcelsius.com) and the infamous Steve Lucas, [...]
I know I have not blogged in a while on EX (this will change in 2012), but I wanted to share some exciting news. The Xcelsius Gurus have joined forces with SAP Wispubs to do a 4-city Xcelsius Bootcamp tour (Chicago, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and Copenhagen). We had a sold-out crowd in Chicago last week, [...]
Welcome to the first of many posts on Everything Xcelsius that will cover Crystal Reports. The goal for this post is to introduce myself and explain the series of posts that you will be seeing over the coming months. So let’s get straight to the first of these topics. My name is Coy Yonce and [...]
Ryan Goodman’s last post, Understanding BI4 Dashboards and XWIS, drew a couple of comments (here and there) expressing frustration that capabilities of third party extensions ought to be delivered as a native part of the SAP Business Objects product. To my mind this is a glass-half-empty view of things. Although the BI4/XI3 platforms come with [...]
If you’re using Xcelsius (now SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards) for your enterprise dashboard projects, by not looking beyond what comes “in the box,” you may well miss out on capabilities which could make a critical difference to your project; even with the advent of BI4. What you get with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is one of the [...]