Altek Solutions Business Intelligence Blog

Sorry we missed our normal Tuesday blog post. I have been really busy finishing off a project and getting ready for a 3 week engagement that starts next Tuesday. So I figured that a short post was better than no post at all.

Another question was put up on the BOB Forum asking if it was possible to automatically move from tab to tab on an interval. A couple options were thrown out there before mine (all valid options) and I decided that I wanted to go the route and try to keep the functionality all inside of Xcelsius instead of trying to constantly pull data in from a data source. After about 30 minutes I was able to do this with 2 history components and a tab set.

Welcome to episode 2 of our Tips and Tricks for Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008). This post is going to be a short one but should help in making your dashboard stand out among the rest. Ever since I started working with Xcelsius 4.5, I had clients wanting functionality built into their dashboards that just wasn’t feasible with the standard out of the box components. One of the biggest request was to take the calendar control and to make it so that they didn’t have to click the toggle button to open the calendar, click the date and then click the toggle button to close the calendar. Too many clicks in the end users eyes. So with every new fix pack / service pack for Xcelsius, I have tried to build the functionality that will allow the end user to click a date and have the calendar disappear. With the addition of the push button, we are now able to do this.

I build and design dashboards pretty much on a daily basis whether it be for a client, POC, or as demo material. One of the biggest things that I dread to hear, is my boss saying either one of these phrases: “How hard would it be….” or “You know what would be cool?” This usually means that I will have to put on my thinking cap and figure out how to pull something off in Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius). TANGENT: Before I go any further, I am going to say that the renaming of Xcelsius to Crystal Dashboard Design has not really sunk in with me, so I apologize for switching back and forth in advance. Anyways, as I was saying, I have to pull off some pretty interesting things relatively often so I thought why not share these Tips and Tricks with everyone who follows our blog. This will be the first entry in a line of many that will pick out a little pieces of functionality that I have built using standard components inside Crystal Dashboard Design and using QaaWS or Live Office. Topic number one is allowing your dashboard to select All of the entries in a selector.

Finally after three projects and three months later, we are back to finish up our Aggregate Awareness series. In part 1 of our blog, we discussed the definition of aggregates and how to create summary tables. Today we are going to finish the process by showing how to implement these items into a SAP BusinessObjects Universe.

Following SAP’s big acquisition of BusinessObjects, more and more companies running SAP are looking to BusinessObjects as an answer for their reporting needs. The BusinessObjects tools WebIntelligence and Xcelsius are well suited for this role. However, getting SAP data into those tools is not yet as easy as SAP would like. For a variety of reasons, BusinessObjects Data Services is the tool of choice for extracting data from SAP. In this post I will explain how Data Services talks to SAP to extract data.

Dashboard and visualizations are a hot topic right now. You can’t go to an SAP BusinessObjects event or a user group meeting without seeing over half of the presentations focusing on dashboards and visualizations. And, like with any cutting-edge technology, it seems everyone is trying to get in on the action. While that’s a good thing, sometimes people lack the basic knowledge and skills to utilize those tools to deliver effective analysis.

Back in March I posted “Five Reasons Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work In Some Organizations“.  In that post, I listed some of the major concerns that I hear from potential clients when the subject of ad hoc reporting is broached.  We’ve already addressed “Our people aren’t smart enough to create their own reports”,  “We [...]

One of the other reasons I hear is that managers don’t want to train end-users to create reports, since they have folks in IT that already tasked with that. Some report authoring will always need to be handled by IT, due to it’s complexity, lack of data availability, etc… But I argue that the lion’s share of the development can be handled within each department instead, freeing IT developers to take on other projects critical to the organization.

Data security is typically a really a big deal for organizations, and it SHOULD be. Thankfully, SAP BusinessObjects offers a number of ways to provide security around functionality, content and data. With some careful planning and a well-designed SAP BusinessObjects implementation, you can rest assured knowing that users will have access to only the information that they are supposed to see.

SAP BusinessObjects has released another fix pack for the newly named Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008). Fix Pack 3.2 is now available for download out on SAP’s Service Marketplace and can be found under the Business Objects Download page through the following path: SAP BusinessObjects Support Software and Corrections > SBOP Dashboard Design Enterprise > BOBJ Xcelsius Enterprise 2008. The Release notes and Fixed Issues documentation can be found in the links below.