Happy New Year. Well, it’s January, so we can still exchange wishes. As you all know, towards the end of 2009, SAP released Service Pack 3 for Xcelsius 2008. I started a video series to show you what’s new in the latest service pack. This is a 2 part series. In part I, I showed you how to download and install the service pack. I also talked about the new components. As promised, here is part II. In these videos I talk about the new features and also performance enhancements. I tried to squeeze it into a single video, but I couldn’t and since I can only upload a 10min or less video on YouTube, I split it into two. So part II comprises of 2 videos. Don’t forget to watch both of them to get a complete overview. I tried to do my best to cover all the new features, if I had missed something, please feel free to use the comments section to shout it out. Watch the videos after the jump.
Kalyan Verma is a BI consultant, freelance Xcelsius Developer and a Web Blogger. He is based out of Boston, MA and his technology interests range from BI to Visual Data Analysis. Visit our Gurus page for more info.
Software as-a-service applications like Salesforce.com and Google Maps Premier enable organizations of all sizes to offload operational and infrastructure costs associated with on-premise software. Organizations that have made significant investments in on-premise business intelligence are now mashing up data from web-based solutions thanks to powerful APIs. In the last year, Salesforce.com and Google Maps integrations for Xcelsius have popped up making it easier than ever to integrate these technologies without any coding. Third party software solution providers like Centigon Solutions and Moss Solutions are bridging the gaps between these powerful web-based platforms and Xcelsius.
For Salesforce.com users, you now have the perfect solution to easily load and analyze data within Xcelsius dashboards. Last year, I was introduced to David Moss of Moss Solutions, who developed the Force.com Integration for Xcelsius. As a technologist I was obviously interested to see how he designed the solution, but as a Salesforce.com customer I was even more excited to see how I could use the integration for my own business. The Force.com Integration for Xcelsius connects directly to Salesforce.com reports, even if your organization uses custom SFDC fields, objects, and report types. The integration leverages all of the filtering, summarization, layout, etc. defined within the Salesforce.com reports, making the integration extremely simple to implement and manage for the user of the component.
As an Xcelsius developer, you can use either a SFDC Connector within the Xcelsius data manager, or an interactive table component which provides inline drilling, grouping, ad-hoc filtering, and navigation of Salesforce.com report data. This tabular component is rich in functionality providing a simple way to drill through large volumes of data with extremely fast performance. A full list of features is available here at Moss Solutions.
Real-World ROI
David and I collaborated last year on a demonstration that I shared at the BusinessObjects user conference. The story behind the dashboard is a real customer use case to understand campaign effectiveness. Our customer’s campaigns invited targeted members to attend one in a series of local trade shows across the US. With lead information and conversion data captured at the tradeshows, the customer wanted to visually analyze who attended the trade show and to what extent the lead interacted with our customer. With a simple Salesforce.com report we could easily view the regional campaigns and view the leads. The report resulted in pages of data, which provided no insight to performance.
As a first time user of the Force.com Integration for Xcelsius, I was drilling through lead data from each campaign down to its campaign members within no time, but still desired a way to visually digest all of the valuable data. I next added the GMaps Plugin for Xcelsius to the dashboard, and setup the Force.com grid component so that drills and selections on the Salesforce.com data would be output to the Xcelsius model, and drive changes within the map. This allowed all of the leads and campaigns to be shown on the map, with the leads color-coded based on their status. The resulting spatial analysis provided tremendous insight based on lead proximity from the campaigns. From this analysis, the customer can not only measure the relative success of the campaigns that have already taken place, but can also quickly assess other locations for future campaigns. (See .swf below)
Using out of the box Xcelsius functionality, we were able to plug in the campaign costs and dynamically calculate financial ratios related to ROI. Using some more advanced calculations we could actually calculate effectiveness of a campaign based on the lead’s proximity from the event. This is the real value that customers want to uncover from dashboard applications and we are on the right path to make this analysis much easier to create.
If you are a Salesforce.com customer who is seeking a way to extract valuable analysis outside of the web-based tools out there, I highly suggest you take a look at the Force.com Integration for Xcelsius from Moss Solutions. You may sign-up for a trial at http://david-moss.com/registration . Feel free to ping me with any questions about my experiences with the technology and how I am going to implement it within my own organization.
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 new Gurus page
I know it’s not a breaking news anymore that Xcelsius SP3 is out there to download. However, I tried to put together a video post on the same. I’m sure by now many of you must have already downloaded the new SP3 and playing with the new and exciting features and components like a little kid who just got his/her Christmas gift. Trust me, I did the same. This is a 2 part video post series. Part I is all about Downloading, Installing and the New Components. Part 2 is all about the new features. I encourage you all to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you don’t miss out on Part 2 video.
Apart from showing how to Download, Install and talking about the new components, I also quickly demonstrated how to use them. Beginners might find it a little hard to follow. Please note that this is just to introduce the components. We will be doing a series of Text and Video posts in the near future to demonstrate the full functionality of the new components.
Kalyan Verma is a BI consultant, freelance Xcelsius Developer and a Web Blogger. He is based out of Boston, MA and his technology interests range from BI to Visual Data Analysis. Visit our Gurus page for more info.
BusinessObjects’ release of Xcelsius 2008 SP3 is a great step forward for customers to benefit from new charting, performance enhancements, and other capabilities that make dashboard development easier. For fellow Xcelsius customers and developers who have been patiently waiting for new functionality, this release is the one we have been waiting for.
Here are my top 10 features to help you jumpstart your exploration of new Xcelsius SP3 enhancements:
Performance
With a commitment to improve performance, there is a new option to optimize Excel performance in addition to promises of improvements to other previous performance concerns both inside of the Xcelsius design environment and runtime SWF files.
Bullet charts
A Steven Few inspired component set, the Bullet chart provides a new visualization tool for Xcelsius developers who want to maximize screen real estate while communicating more data.
Sparklines
Sparklines are the second new charting edition to Xcelsius that also provide significant value for organizations who want to leverage the popular data visualization control within Xcelsius. Previously only attained with add-on components, this functionality comes packaged with Xcelsius.
Selector Enhancements
In Xcelsius, staging data for visualization has long contributed to the learning curve required for building excellent dashboards. As a step forward to make selector configuration easier, the Xcelsius team has exposed new global properties for selectors. Hopefully this is only the first step to seeing significant improvements to selectors since this is the most powerful yet difficult concept to learn in Xcelsius.
No selection- Sometimes a developer does not want a selector to trigger until it is clicked on. While this request is simple in concept, this functionality was not available until now. For the casual Xcelsius developer this is not a major feature until it becomes a requirement, but those fellow developers who have experienced this limitation will appreciate this feature.
Multi-selection- Another developer-centric feature, multi-selection capabilities will enable a dashboard to trigger multiple events which was previously accomplished with workarounds (Excel logic and hidden selectors). The first time you open a standard selector, developers will noticed a revised property sheet UI that is extremely easy to pick up using previous Xcelsius experience.
Chart Enhancements
Sorting- The chart sorting requirements traditionally fulfilled with Excel logic or add-on components are now fulfilled for charts using a new sort behavior. Accessible in the chart behavior tab during design time, this functionality is extremely valuable when data is not loaded into a dashboard pre-sorted.
Labeling- As one of the most commonly requested features for Xcelsius, visible chart labels is now available simply by checking a box in the chart appearance tab under labels. Enable value and series label functionality and format them according to your design specifications.
Chart slider
To fill in IMT time slider capabilities previously available in BusinessObjects performance manager, developers can extend flexibility for end users to focus on a specific range within a time series using a dual slider. Built directly into the Xcelsius chart components, you can easily enable this functionality in the behavior tab.
Bindable Colors
As one of my personal favorites, you can now bind any color to the spreadsheet using a simple color binding option.
Scorecard
For any existing Xcelsius developers who have struggled aligning icons or hidden selectors, a real scorecard component will be a breath of fresh air, making it a relatively simple process for configuring alert indicators within a vertical table. I can instantly see a lot of opportunities to expand on this component, so I am interested to hear the community use cases for this new component.
Canvas Container Component
This is a nice component for new Xcelsius developers who want to group components without learning dynamic visibility. This component is available with the other container components.
New Gauge properties
Gauges have long been criticized for consuming a large volume of screen real estate without displaying enough information within the control. For customers who insist on using these controls, Xcelsius offers additional capabilities previously available in BusinessObjects performance manager. Bind multiple values to a single gauge and track them as marker indicators or additional needles. From the second you open the gauge property sheet, you can easily take advantage of these new features using the same paradigm you have always used.
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 new Gurus page
As part of a small series that works through building a custom component, from demonstrating very basic functionality to more advanced and detailed property sheet integrations, I wanted to start with a very familiar and simple component concept to get started: A custom Flex-based column chart.
We’ll start by setting up the Flex component, its charting data provider, a few basic styles, and a very basic custom property sheet integration. You can find all of the (xlx, xlp, Flex source) source code here…
We’re working with an MXML-based component to illustrate a rapid way to construct custom charts and also because I prefer markup to pure ActionScript coding for readability and ease of use. I also think that a lot of attendees learning about the SDK for the first time at the BOBJ conference in October looked rightfully frightened seeing pure AS components and 1000’s of lines of code for 1 simple component. Here, we’ve used <100 lines of code for our chart, mostly markup, and we have achieved an impressively rapid custom column chart as the result. Creating this entire project (chart, property sheet, Xcelsius Packager) took under an hour.
We’ll keep posting updated source code as this component evolves through the series, including in-line source code comments. Please note* Use the code however you’d like. However, it will be up to you to ensure its stability and is not recommended for a production environment, more as a jump start to inspire confidence and ideas for injecting easy and free custom charts into your Xcelsius projects.
To use the component in Xcelsius, bind the data property to a single row of data, as we only have 1 series at this stage. Then, select your fill type and you’re all set.
**I took the property sheet directly from the BOBJ SDK examples and quickly modified it to meet these requirements. Try it for yourself and see what else you can add on if you’d like.
**Also, remember to set up this project using the SDK fundamentals (i.e. setting the compiler to 2.0.1 HF3, referencing the Xcelsius SDK swc, etc.)
**If anyone has a custom chart they’d like to see, please feel free to comment.
Next, we’ll look at adding multiple series, custom tooltips, number formatting and some additional styling controls.
Interested in hiring one of our Gurus to build your dashboards?
What about training your organization on Xcelsius to house your dashboard internally? Need monthly support? We offer a number of services. Please contact us to find out more!
RT @clebervisconti: I don't like to promote solutions, but to bring new features and Google Maps to Xcelsius, Centigon Solutions has ver ... Go2010/02/10
RT @ClearPeaks: Our Oracle BI team delivered a training course today on OBI EE Dashboard Design and Report Design. Our course info: http ... Go2010/02/09
Sorry folks! Working on getting the new video fixed. Bear with us. Go2010/02/09
by Kalyan Verma 
Happy New Year. Well, it’s January, so we can still exchange wishes. As you all know, towards the end of 2009, SAP released Service Pack 3 for Xcelsius 2008. I started a video series to show you what’s new in the latest service pack. This is a 2 part series. In part I, I showed you how to download and install the service pack. I also talked about the new components. As promised, here is part II. In these videos I talk about the new features and also performance enhancements. I tried to squeeze it into a single video, but I couldn’t and since I can only upload a 10min or less video on YouTube, I split it into two. So part II comprises of 2 videos. Don’t forget to watch both of them to get a complete overview. I tried to do my best to cover all the new features, if I had missed something, please feel free to use the comments section to shout it out. Watch the videos after the jump.
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I know it’s not a breaking news anymore that Xcelsius SP3 is out there to 
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