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 Matt Lloyd).

This Service Pack is a cumulative patch, so it incorporates all the patches to-date and delivers new fixes and features. All files must be extracted and downloaded from the zip file and ran directly from your hard drive. After Service Pack 5 (SP5) is installed, the version number in the about box will change to: 5.5.0.0.

Noted additions to this service pack include:

1. Wrap Text Support for Scorecards: In scorecard components, text can be set to wrap within cells.
2. Enhanced Support for Bubble Charts: Now you can now bind the alert values in a bubble chart so you can have one series but have control over the bubble colors using alerts (before you had to define one series for each color which was a pain). Below is a screenshot of the Bubble Chart.

Listed below is all the provided documentation you will need:

• Xcelsius 2008 Service Pack 5 User Guide
• Xcelsius 2008 Service Pack 5 Supported Platforms
• SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 Service Pack 5 Release Notes (includes Xcelsius) (SMP Login Required)
• What’s new in SAP BusinessObjects XI3.1 Service Pack 5 (includes Xcelsius)

Be sure to keep updated on everything BOBJ, BI4 & Xcelsius by following us on:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Soo Tang Yuk (@sootangyuk) is the ‘Xcelsius Gurus Network” community manager and evangelist. To find out more about her, please visit the About Us page.

Creating reports and dashboards in Excel prepared me well for transition to Xcelsius. Its mashup of art and technology impressed me from the moment I opened a trial version and I enthusiastically promoted Xcelsius in the company I worked for then.

Starting with Xcelsius 4.0 we developed a line of web analytics dashboards for financial institutions. Our clients loved them. Instead of hundreds static slides in PowerPoint decks, they received interactive dashboards with intuitive navigation and the level of detail not supported in the legacy reports.  While the data preparation on the database side and in Excel was the bulk of the work, using Xcelsius for the presentation delivered the knockout punch. The resounding success of the project made me even stronger proponent of Xcelsius. It also inspired me to be creative and look for workarounds when Xcelsius doesn’t support needed functionality out of the box.

While getting better with every new release, Xcelsius still needs more popularization. Everything Xcelsius is one of the major players in that field. I’ve been a big fan of the website for many years, regularly visiting the site, learning new techniques and developing new skills. I’m glad to have a chance to share some of my ideas, tips and tricks here.

In the next several posts I’m going to examine various applications of customized Push Button controls in Xcelsius. Stay tuned!!

Leonid Koyfman is a BI professional with over 10 years of experience in a database design and development and in delivering reporting solutions using enterprise reporting technologies. He is a big Xcelsius enthusiast passionate about dashboard design and other kinds of data visualization. In his leisure time Leonid enjoys solving mental puzzles and hiking in the Bay Area with his family.

While we try to keep promotions to a minimum on EverythingXcelsius.com, we could not resist posting about this new component because it is so heavily requested among customers. While some would argue that a basic function like printing should be taken care of by SAP, history has told us that they prefer to use the ecosystem to fill in certain gaps. Frankly, I don’t think that it could have been done any better than this.

After clicking on the print icon, you can click and drag to draw the area for which you will print. This way if you only want a portion of your dashboard printed, you can do so.

While still inside of your dashboard, you can instantly toggle the scale, margins, layout, and alignment of your image to print exactly what you want. This way every user is presented with the same visual print setup regardless of operating system.

So if you need an advanced print button for Xcelsius, you can now look to DataSavy Tools for a sound solution moving forward. Get the Dash Printer NOW!

Ryan Goodman is the Founder of Centigon Solutions, an SAP® software solution partner, that is strategically focused on developing add-on products for use with Xcelsius®. To learn more about him, please visit our Gurus page.

All of these different types of BI can either be accessed in a standalone mode or embedded. With SAP BusinessObjects, standalone can mean either via a desktop application, BI LaunchPad, or one of the various mobile applications that exist. From an embedded standpoint, you could imagine information being delivered via an internal portal (e.g., SharePoint) or within another vendor’s application (e.g., Sage CRM). For SAP Crystal Reports, and other reporting tools, this has been a cornerstone for engaging partners and proliferating BI content.

Operational Reports

When you think of reporting, you would typically envision something like operational reports. These are reports that contain specific details about an entity and are directly responsible for supporting business processes. For example, if you were a support representative and were helping a customer on the phone, you might want to see a list of all orders that the customer has placed over the past 12 months. An operational report, such as the one below, would be one way to display this information.

In addition, operational reports are usually embedded directly within other applications. In the above example, the reports for support representatives could be embedded directly within a CRM application. This would allow the individual on the phone with the customer to click a button or a link and quickly bring up the information that they need to reference. In this scenario, the data is either contained within a database behind the CRM application or is generated by the application. In either case, the data is then pushed into the embedded report while the application is running so that the support representative can get what they need in real time.

The figure below shows an example of an application, Sage SalesLogix, which currently embeds Crystal Reports content.

In this workflow, a user has searched or browsed a list of available reports in order to find the one that is relevant for them.

In any case, the important bit is that Sage did not need to develop a report component on their own. They were able to take something, Crystal Reports, which was already built and embed it. The benefit to their customers is that they have a well known reporting solution built in, they can create their own reports using Crystal Reports, and can more easily upgrade their reporting solution by leveraging the SAP BusinessObjects suite to deliver other types of BI content.

Leveraging Embedded Reporting as a Model for Embedded BI

The widespread embedding of Crystal Reports, and other reporting solutions, into other software begs the question of how we (as a general BI ecosystem) can leverage all of this experience of embedding reporting so that we can make it easier to embed BI as a whole. There are examples out there today where interactive BI content and analytics are being embedded; however, this is an area of growth for BI.

What examples do you know of where this is being done today? How can BI software vendors make this easier?

Coy Yonce is a Principal Technical Architect at EV Technologies and has worked in Business Intelligence for over 10 years. Before joining EV Technologies, Coy was a Crystal Reports Product Owner at SAP for many years. His main focus is leading conversations and being active in the BI community. Connect with him directly via:

Twitter – SDN – Zerply – Scribd – Slideshare – LinkedIn – Google+

The product itself is commonly identified as a Business Intelligence tool; however, it is also referred to as a product for Enterprise Reporting, Operational Reporting, or Business Intelligence Reporting. Regardless of the classification, many market analysts consider reporting to be a key component of any Business Intelligence product suite. At SAP, it is classified under the Business Analytics suite of products.

Who are some of the key competitors for Crystal Reports?

• Microsoft SQL Reporting Services
• IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Reporting
• Information Builders
• Telerik Reporting
• JasperReports
• Pentaho Report Designer
• Microsoft Office Suite
• Oracle Reports
• ActiveReports
• Stonefield Query
• QlikTech
• Tableau

With all of these competitors, plus many others that I have not mentioned, the struggle is to differentiate while maintaining true to the vision of creating strongly typed, interactive reports on top of any data source and allowing those reports to be distributed to users in their own environment.  We don’t want to create an analysis tool. We don’t want to create a tool for the average user to start creating reports. SAP BusinessObjects provides other tools for that purpose. We want to be the tool used to create beautiful reports on top of the amalgamation of any data sources you can throw at it.

Through the years, we have found ways to create interest around the product. We’ve been an embedded report designer in many development environments: Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Borland, and Rational. We’ve created features that allow for accessing newer data sources like XML and web services. We’ve provided ways to embed more engaging visualizations via the embedding of Flash objects. We’ve also provided more interactive features for the report consumer – without stepping too far into the realm of creating a pure analysis tool.

We have our fans and we have our haters. Most people like our ability to create strongly typed reports, the fact that we connect to many different types of data, and the interactive features that we provide for report consumers. Some people struggle with using an outdated report design UI and with embedding reports into their own applications via our APIs. We have a plan for addressing those concerns and delighting our already ecstatic users.

Starting with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0, we introduced a new report design tool that is currently called SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise. Over the next few years, you will see this become the primary report design tool that customers use; however, this will take some time. Not only do we need to close gaps between the mainstream version of crystal and the new version, but we also need to get customers onto the BI 4.0 platform before they can start using the product.

While closing gaps is a definitely a priority for creating interest in the new designer, we also want to introduce new features that will delight users when they find them. Some examples are our new REST and JavaScript APIs, new visualizations capabilities, a focus on best practices in information design, enhanced viewer workflows, and an online library of report templates. I will write posts about those topics later on both Everything Xcelsius and the SAP Community Network.

For now, I’d like to share with you a quick summary of the posts you will see over the next few weeks.

Types of Reports

I plan to write a four part series that will focus on the types of reports that typically created with products like SAP Crystal Reports and how you can go about creating them. The four types of reports that will be covered are: Operational Reports, Short-Term Strategic Reports, Long-Term Strategic Reports, and Forms. Each of these has their place and purpose in a Business Intelligence deployment.

Coy Yonce is a Principal Technical Architect at EV Technologies and has worked in Business Intelligence for over 10 years. Before joining EV Technologies, Coy was a Crystal Reports Product Owner at SAP for many years. His main focus is leading conversations and being active in the BI community. Connect with him directly via:

Twitter – SDN – Zerply – Scribd – Slideshare – LinkedIn – Google+

Steve Lucas and Adam Binnie of SAP

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, Global GM & Senior Executive of the SAP Business Analytics & Technology Portfolio!

If you attended our event in previous years, you probably know that it looks more like a Vegas nightclub on Friday night than a regular ‘boring’ corporate event.  We plan to keep it that way (just don’t tell our sponsors at SAP ).

Now for the long awaited details:

• Location: ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference (Orlando, FL)
• Hosts: Steve Lucas & Mico Yuk
• Date/Time: Tuesday, October 11, from 6:30-9:30pm EST
• Room – (Final details will be sent in confirmation email on 9/29)
• Attendee Count: 250 (space is limited)
• Special Guests – Bridgette Chambers (ASUG CEO) and much more!
• Prizes – 3 door prizes (just drop your business card in at the door to enter), BI4 Video Confession prizes!
• BI4 Video Contest - Submit your videos now, or take them at the event to gain a chance to win an iPad2.  More details by clicking here!
• Features – 2 Open Bars, Open Buffet, networking tables..
• How to RSVP: Please send an email with ‘RSVP’ in the subject to events@everythingxcelsius.com by Wednesday, October 5, 2011.
• IMPORTANT! –  You MUST be REGISTERED for the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects conference to attend this event. Space is limited and we are always booked to capacity within 48 hours of this notice, so please send in your RSVP as soon as possible. Confirmation details will be sent out via email prior to the event with instructions on where to pickup your wrist band. All registered guests will be required to show a wristband upon entrance without exception.

Sponsored in part by SAP, the event promises to provide a host of surprise guest, as well as a BI4 video confession booth where customers can tell their story to win exciting prizes, a chance to network with fellow SAP BusinessObjects community members and the SAP BI team, door prizes, 2 open bars and an open buffet! Let’s also not forget it’s ASUG’s 20th Anniversary celebration!

We would also like put in a call for volunteers, if interested please send an email to gurus@everythingxcelsius.com. We can’t wait to see you! Thanks!

A SPECIAL THANK YOU to Kurt Bilafer, Jason Rose, Sanjay Poonen and of course my wonderful co-host Steve Lucas of the SAP BI Team, and Bridgette Chambers and her right-hand man Richard Zepeda of the ASUG team for making this event possible! Thanks for supporting our community!

Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network, the Everything Xcelsius blog, and co-founder of Benchmarkers Business Intelligence. To learn more about her, please visit her about page.

Here are 3 reasons why you should attend (IMO):

• Mico’s Part – In case you have never heard me speak, I love to rock the crowd.  This is no different.  I get to open the event by introducing all of the other speakers and also laying the foundation down on how to scope and plan one’s dashboards.  The feedback I got form the first hour from a few attendees was simple: “This was worth the entire cost Mico”.
• Two Hands-On Sessions: It also features 2-hard core hands on sessions that include building a dashboard and using other exciting features in BI4.0 with SAP’s very own Matt Lloyd and Decision First Technologies, Chris Hickman
• World Class Speakers – fellow Xcelsius Gurus, Chris Hickman of Decision First Technologies (who is an SAP BusinessObjects ace and provides deep insight on all BOE related topics), Dr. Bjarne Berg of Comerit (who is an SAP BW and Xcelsius specialist), Matt Lloyd of SAP (not sure there is anyone who knows the Xcelsius platform better, we go back many years), Emily Mui of SAP (another old friend who handles the marketing of the product and has deep insight and answers for customers regarding the roadmap), then myself Mico Yuk (just the biggest Xcelsius groupie that ever lived)
• I must add the 100% Money-back Guarantee though I can assure you, NO ONE will use it. We had a 97% referral rate from the Chicago event!
• Much more – Panel discussions, Governance and Performance Tips

Here is a pic from the Chicago event, just so you can see how packed and intense these sessions were.  Energy was amazing.  Even I learned a few things!

Philadelphia is coming up in just 7-days and we are almost sold out. Same goes for Vegas as far as I know.  As you know we always want to ensure our community is well taken care of.  So for those of you who sign up from reading this blog by 9/30 to ANY of the locations, you will get a complimentary free 6-month membership to the new BusinessObjects Expert website (high quality content) as a THANK YOU from EverythingXcelsius.com.  We created this deal especially for you and it is NOT available elsewhere, not even on the actual registration website. Sign up now!

Complimentary FREE 6 month Subscription to the BusinessObjects Expert Website (using our URL)

Note you MUST USE the specific URL in this blog to get the FREE membership.  Cut and paste into your browser if it is not working:  http://www.xcelsiusbootcamp.com/homePage.cfm?usergroup=bbi-us. (Please note, upon completion of  registration to the bootcamp, you will receive a notification within 24-48 hours with instructions on how to signup for the free 6-month subscription.)

I look forward to seeing all of you, so drop me a line if you plan to attend. I have another huge announcement this week for the ASUG SAPBusinessObjects User Conference attendees about our exclusive BI4 Release Party and how to RSVP. Stay tuned!

Ciao,

Mico Yuk

Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network, the Everything Xcelsius blog, and co-founder of Benchmarkers Business Intelligence. To learn more about her, please visit her about page.

My name is Coy Yonce and I’m one of the Product Owners who work on the Crystal Reports product. If you are not familiar with the agile approach to product development, then you may not be familiar with the role of a Product Owner. In essence, I’m a Product Manager and I help create the backlog of features that the development will be building from one release to the next. My role as  Product Owner is a bit different from the role of the other Product Owners on the Crystal Reports team. In all, there are seven of us. The other six work directly with a team of developers and guide those developers during the building of features. My role is that of an outbound Product Owner. I focus on leading conversations with customers and partners so that we have an understanding of what they want to see us include in upcoming versions of the product. As such, I am fairly active on Twitter, blog every so often, conduct surveys, co-host influence council meetings, write articles, interact on forum posts, and monitor ideas on SAP IdeaPlace. I’m sure that there are a few other things as well, but that’s most of it.

Over the next few months, you will see several posts from me. They will be organized into a series of posts on somewhat tactical topics. I have provided an brief overview of the series below. I have listed them in the order that I plan to write; however, I may get a bit sidetracked as I encounter an interesting topic or discussion.

Introduction to SAP Crystal Reports and Enterprise Reporting
This will likely be a single post and will provide an overview of Enterprise Reporting, the market, and how Crystal Reports fits in.

Types of Reports
More than likely, this will be delivered over four posts with each covering a major category of report types that are typically created using Crystal Reports.

Major Features
Again, probably a series of numerous posts with each discussing a category of features that are used together for creating reports in Crystal Reports.

Design Considerations
This series will focus on designing effective reports. Specifically, it will demonstrate how to create reports that follow information design best practices.

Connecting to Data
Crystal Reports currently has over 50 available connections available. This series will focus on not only the types of data available for creating reports, but specific considerations for building reports against some of those data sources.

Sharing Reports
Once you’ve created your reports, you need to distribute them. This series will focus on the methods available for delivering your reports.

Embedding Reports
Crystal Reports has a very large ecosystem of developers from OEM partners and ISVs. Much of what they do is embed pre-built reports into their applications or generate reports at runtime based on data from their applications. This series will focus on how to embed Crystal Reports and leverage your application data.

As you can see the topics are quite broad and will encompass a significant number of posts. As mentioned above, I will attempt to cover these topics in order; however, I may need to skip around a bit to cover a set of related topics properly. In any case, I look forward to blogging on Everything Xcelsius and would like to thank Mico and Soo for the opportunity to interact with such a diverse audience.

Thanks for reading.

Coy Yonce is a Crystal Reports Product Owner at SAP and has worked in Business Intelligence for over 10 years. His  main focus is leading conversations with customers and partners and is very active in the BI community. You may reach out to him directly via email at coy.yonce@sap.com or follow him on twitter: @coyyonce.

To my mind this is a glass-half-empty view of things. Although the BI4/XI3 platforms come with numerous connectivity options for Xcelsius, no software is ever 100% feature complete (that is what upgrades are all about), so inevitably there is room for people to dream up ways in which features could be better. The great thing about SAP BusinessObjects is that (through both their Crystal and BusinessObjects histories) they have had the foresight to make sure their products are open to third-party developers to extend and enhance their BI platform through an ecosystem of innovation. So the glass-is-half-full view is that rather than having to wait for SAP BusinessObjects to provide a particular feature in a future release there is a product which fills them today.

(As a side note, the nature of third-party extension means that this also follows Vishal Sikka’s vision of “innovation without disruption”, with extension products integrating seamlessly with existing versions of the platform.) As I mentioned in a recent post on BI standardization, this partner ecosystem is one of the key advantages of choosing a large BI platform vendor.

In one of the comments the concern was that customers have to spend more money on such partner extensions. Again this is a glass-half-empty view because, whilst extensions will usually come at a cost (third-parties have to make a living too) they will also usually be designed to provide a return on investment. Anything else is just too hard to sell, so using the right extensions should be a financial saving rather than a financial drain.

The other comment seemed a bit confusing, it started by asking “why are we looking for different products to try and integrate with one another” and ended up suggesting a jump to a completely different dashboarding environment, which would require much more integration effort with the core BI platform, than any well designed platform extension would need. This comment is doubly ironic as many platform extension products are specifically designed to add features which avoid the need to jump to new non-integrated environments.

Overall I would recommend you resist the urge to be indignant and reject third party tools because they “should have come in the box”, this is a classic instance of being “right rather than effective”, make full use of the power of the ecosystem around your BI platform, assess extensions on the ROI they generate for your current situation and only when you run out of options inside your ecosystem consider non-integrated tools outside it.

Donald MacCormick is the Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Antivia, an SAP® software solution partner, and creator of XWIS the Xcelsius-to-SAP BusinessObjects connectivity solution. In past years, he was a long term member of BusinessObjects and Crystal, and part of the team that brought Xcelsius into the BusinessObjects portfolio.

What you get with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is one of the best dashboard design platforms because of its free-form design paradigm for rapid dashboard development. Another great thing about SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is the community of experts and third party providers who fuel adoption, education, and innovation.

A great example of this is XWIS from Antivia. The folks at Antivia say “every connected Xcelsius project could deliver better, faster and at lower cost using XWIS” and I have to say there is good reason for this, having created many connected dashboards over the years. I have taken a stronger stance in the last year endorsing XWIS 2.5 and would agree that XWIS can deliver between 10 and 20 times productivity improvement to Xcelsius projects. “Production dashboards in days not weeks or months” can actually be achieved, which is why XWIS has become a tool of my dashboard design trade!

Having said that, over the last few months I have been asked a number of times if the value of XWIS diminishes now that BI 4 is about to go to GA. My short answer is “no” for XWIS 2.5 and “absolutely not” for the recently announced XWIS 3.0. To elaborate, I wanted to share both XWIS and BI4 capabilities so you can determine for yourself.

What do I get in the box with BI 4?

BI4 is a significant upgrade to the SAP BusinessObjects product suite, perhaps the largest in its history, and has customers eagerly awaiting the GA (some details of the new capabilities of BI 4 can be found at SCN in Pierre Leroux’s blog: “Innovations SAP BusinessObjects 4.0“).

Included in the upgrade are a number of enhancements specific to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0, the most significant being:

Embedded Query Designer

The embedded query designer is a great new way of streamlining the existing Query as a Web Service (QaaWS) process. Now it is possible to design your queries using a standard BOBJ query panel inside the Xcelsius environment. No more needing to reach for the stand-alone QaaWS front end. It currently only works on the new “unx” universes but expect that to change in the future. So, for people who are using QaaWS today this represents a great step forward in terms of developer workflow and productivity.

Direct binding

For queries which are created with the new embedded query designer, it is now possible to bind the results directly to chart and selector components, without having to go through the spreadsheet. This is yet another important step forward for the maturity of this dashboard development platform, alleviating traditional workflow and performance implications of spreadsheet binding.

Parameter Selector Component

Working in tandem with the previous two features the parameter selector component makes it simpler to add query parameterization capabilities to your dashboard so that the end-user can see different slices of data by selecting a new parameter for the underlying query.

What are you missing by staying inside of the box?

There are many compelling reasons to use XWIS with both XI 3 and BI 4, including long standing XWIS features, such as:

Content re-use:

One of the strengths of XWIS is that is lets you reuse existing BI content (WebI reports, Crystal reports (on a universe or not), JBDC queries …). It is almost certain that you already have the data you need for your dashboard in an existing, managed price of content already governed under SLAs. XWIS allows you to re-use this content rather than having to create new queries.

Hierarchies and auto-drill:

XWIS natively supports hierarchies from your universe, but even better, it also provides an interface to edit and persist new hierarchy definitions, so you can re-use them on other dashboard projects. Furthermore, through its hierarchical data support, XWIS also supports auto- drill both within its own components and also in native Xcelsius components using its innovative Autowire feature (see below).

Cached Data Sources:

Because XWIS can leverage Crystal or WebI as a data source (in addition to JDBC), you can leverage BOE scheduling to offload complex number crunching, and then push scheduled data to your dashboard that you can drill and filter through.

Dynamic Measures and Dimensions:

One of the really powerful features of XWIS is the possibility to change the dimensions and measures (and even the underlying report) dynamically at run-time depending on end-user actions. This is a game changing feature for developers; with a flick of a switch you can increase the sophistication of your dashboards to answer more end-user requirements more easily.

Design-Time Variables

If you require a custom variable in a dashboard, you don’t have to go back to the universe designer or bind your data to the spreadsheet, in XWIS, you can create custom variables right inside of the property sheet while maintaining its hierarchical relevance and drill path.

Autowire:

Bypasses the spreadsheet for charting components and allows XWIS components to directly connect to Xcelsius charts complete with support for hierarchies and auto-drill.

And now in XWIS 3.0, there is even more capability, including:

Live preview

The latest version of XWIS allows you to see your data immediately at design time, in tables, charts, and even GMaps Plugin. This is a huge timesaver and changes the whole dynamic of creating a dashboard by eliminating the need to continually go to preview mode to see how the dashboard will look to end users. This feature really does have to be seen to get a full appreciation of how radically it alters the design experience.

Data Sync:

Keeping a number of components in sync whilst navigating around a dashboard, is often a key requirement (and one that some niche dashboard providers have done a good job at), the new data component in XWIS 3.0 brings this capability to Xcelsius.

Data Merge:

With many organizations needing to combine BusinessObjects data with other sources (e.g.  SQL, OLAP, spreadsheet), XWIS allows you to merge data from multiple sources, within your dashboard, and then take advantage of all the XWIS capabilities (auto-drill, slice and dice, etc) using the combined dataset.

Where do you go from here?

When the rubber meets the road and stakeholders are accountable for delivering dashboards back to the business, developers need confidence to deliver a wide range of capabilities. This is where tools from partners within the SAP eco-system can make the difference to your XI3 and your BI4 projects.

When it comes to a complete dashboard lifecycle, I have always believed that Antivia approaches BusinessObjects connectivity and integration the way that it should have been done in the first place with Xcelsius. New BI4 enhancements illustrate that SAP is committed to improving enterprise integration and connectivity. If your company is already building dashboards with success using QaaWS for your enterprise initiative, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 will certainly be a breath of fresh air. However, if you really want to get the most from your dashboard development investment, I suggest that you give XWIS a serious look.

Feel free to post questions and comments here, as I would love to get the community’s feedback on this topic.

Ryan Goodman is the Founder of Centigon Solutions, an SAP® software solution partner, that is strategically focused on developing add-on products for use with Xcelsius®. To learn more about him, please visit our Gurus page