Talk about neat?  Outside of being excited that SAP is entering THIS century with their marketing efforts take a quick peek at the impressive TOP 5 EXPERT LIST below which you can also follow on twitter here.

1. Mico Yuk – yes that’s me, so hopefully you are somewhat biased in your voting LOL! SAP 2010 Mentor, Founder of this blog / Xcelsius Gurus Network, Xcelsius fanatic/blogger
2. Jamie Oswald – fellow SAP 2010 mentor, former GBN Ambassador, long-time BOE Specialist
3. David Deitch –   Owner of largest Linkedin Crystal Reports Group, long-time Crystal Reports Guru
4. Jim Brodgen – SAP BOE Webi Author, Xcelsius 2010 Winter Olympics winner, long-time BOE Guru
5. Brian Durning – ASUG Crystal Reports SIG Chair, long-time Crystal Reports Guru

The competition officially starts today so be sure to visit the site and sign up for email updates to win prizes!  I will be blogging throughout and offering some specials to our community as well.

GET STARTED NOW – Vote on our first challenge poll today to pick which dashboard you want us to build and win a $25 Itunes gift card. Click here!

Here are some related articles:

1. Official Press Release
2. Social Media Today Article

Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Gurus Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.

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Sorry for the late notice, but I wanted to be sure to invite you to a webinar that is being hosted by Ryan Goodman and I on Monday (08/16/10) entitled ‘Dashboard Xtreme Makeover’.  I was not going to blog about this, but now that we’ve finalized the content I was so excited I had to give you a sneak peek. It’s the ‘never before seen stuff’ that Gurus do.

Webinar History  – In 2008 Ryan hosted Part I of this same series. Due its popularity it was voted as the overall #2 webinar by the BusinessObjects community. For Part 2 we wanted to present a simple process that can be used by just about anyone.

The results? For the first time ever we are going to present a ‘5 Step Process to Design or Re-design your Dashboards’.  Note, we did not say GUIDELINES but an actual easy to follow PROCESS.  Below are the high level steps. You’ll have to attend for more details! See you there.

• Step 1: Choose Layout Template (we provide up to 50 layouts!)
• Step 2: Choose Data Visualizations (which chart, where?)
• Step 3: Perform Cosmetic Surgery
• Step 4:  Solicit User Feedback
• Step 5:  Quality Checklist (Final Considerations)

NOTE: You must be an ASUG registered member to attend (remember all former GBN customers can join ASUG for free for a limitd time).  You must login to ASUG.com first. Click here to register.

Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.

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If you are the average Xcelsius user who demos dashboards on a regular basis via PowerPoint you’ve probably encountered the issue seen below when you try to view your dashboards in PPT after updating to Adobe Flash Player 10.1  As you can see this issue has been looming for about a month now, and there is finally a solution.

This week SAP informed us that they’ve finally been able to work with Adobe to create a patch.  The good  news?  While Adobe will not be releasing the patch until another week or so, anyone who desperately needs it can contact SAP support to obtain it early!

Here is Adobe’s official announcement.

Be sure to return and share your experiences with the community!

Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.

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The problem:

You may develop a button, canvas, list box, tree viewer or other UI component in Flex, apply inline styling directives, package it up for use in Xcelsius and view it in the Xcelsius designer without issue.  However, when you enter runtime mode in Xcelsius, your component may lose some or all of its inline styles, rendering it partially unusable or invisible. This is due to the parent Flex Xcelsius application inadvertently stripping away styles at runtime.

The solution:

For a generic solution to skinning and styling reapplication, you’ll need to reference in your project library path, the haloclassic.swc swc in the Flex SDK directory (a path similar to this C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\2.0.1\frameworks\themes\haloclassic.swc). Once you have referenced the swc, create a CSS file for your component(s) that specifies all of the default skins and styles to their halo default or desired style as shown in the sample code below (full code here). This set of steps will need to be implemented as needed on a per-component basis if your components are experiencing style loss. Once you have defined your CSS file, the next step is to reference it in your component file as you would any other CSS asset.

.myButton {
backgroundAlpha: 1.0;
backgroundSize: “auto”;
bevel: true;
borderAlpha: 1.0;
borderCapColor: #919999;
borderColor: #B7BABC;
borderSides: “left top right bottom”;
borderSkin: ClassReference(“mx.skins.halo.HaloBorder”);
borderStyle: “inset”;
borderThickness: 1;

…..

<mx:Style source=”myButtonStyle.css” />
<mx:Button label=”My Button” styleName=”myButton”/>

There is an alternate to this approach, which would be to reapply styles with ActionScript code. However, this approach is more compact and has little to no impact on your actual component files. As a best practice for visual Xcelsius components, define your styles in CSS as opposed to inline to prevent the build up of redundant style specifications.

Evan DeLodder is a Senior Software Engineer focused on the development and application of cutting edge Rich Internet Application technologies in the Business Intelligence space. To learn more about him, please visit our new FleXcelsius page.

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My first post, Dear aBI: Dashboarding Must-Haves, was published today! I look forward to your comments!

Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.

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