Posted on November 18, 2012 by admin

SAP Design Studio goes GA

Earlier this week SAP Design Studio (aka Zen) became generally available within the SAP Marketplace.  Many people have been looking to download it and having a hard time doing so.  Tammy Powlas  has a good blog on where to find Zen in the Marketplace and how to download it.  You can see that blog below:

http://scn.sap.com/community/businessobjects-design-studio/blog/2012/11/17/sap-businessobjects-design-studio–your-first-steps-to-find-it-download-it

A couple of things I noticed with the initial install of Zen

  1. The installation requires IE9 as a prerequisite as well as BI Platform 4.0 SP5 (which also released within the last week)
  2. Data connects to both SAP Netweaver BW and SAP HANA directly (future data sources may be made available with later releases)
  3. Installation comprised of two files. Follow the directions carefully when installing, as usual, it’s not a straightforward install like other BOBJ BI installations.  This one uses a similar GUI to the SAP GUI.

I will be posting my thought within the next few days after playing around with Zen.  Please let me know your thoughts below.

 

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Posted on November 9, 2012 by admin

(Zen vs Dashboards) or (Zen & Dashboards)

SAP will soon be releasing Zen or Design Studio towards the end of the year and it to me I’m still not sold on it’s practical use by non-coders.  All demos I’ve seen of it so far indicate that it is heavy in coding and light on user-friendliness.

Next week, SAP is rumored to announce the release of SAP Dashboards 4.0 SP5 with HTML5 Export capability.  This will be the first time that the legacy Xcelsius/Dashboards tool will deliver a method of getting a dashboard directly visible on a tablet like an iPad.

It will be interesting to see how the two tools converge into one dashboard tool down the road by SAP.

We’ll be watching.

In the meantime, you can read more about this at Pieter Hendrikx Blog below:

http://www.pieterhendrikx.com/save-the-date-sap-dashboards-html5-export-on-november-13th/

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Posted on September 6, 2011 by admin

2011 SAP Business Objects User Conference

Next month I will be giving a talk on the importance of keeping your data close to the source with a presentation at the annual SAP Business Objects User Conference in Orlando, FL (October 9-12).

This will be the third year in a row that I’ve presented at the conference and I really do enjoy everything about it from a speaker and an attendee perspective. You learn a lot just by presenting on a specific topic (for me I have a passion for Web Intelligence) and you learn so much from the other experts in their areas of practice and education. Additionally, everyone seems so willing to share their experiences.

My topic this year is called “Keep Your Data Close to Your Source: Common Excel Functionality Now Available in SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence”. This really hits home with especially my days back as an analyst. I saved so much time building reports in Webi as a finished product as opposed to using it as the first source of information and exporting it to Excel for the final touches.

The three main takeaways from the talk will be the following:
1. Learn how to utilize drill filters and input controls to mimic pivot table filters.
2. Find out how to simulate header freezes for scrolling large portions of data without selecting different pages.
3. Learn how to incorporate rogue calculations within additional increasing rows and columns

You can view the full details below:
http://boucschedule.asug.com/Agenda/Details.aspx?SID=316

To learn more about the conference see below:
http://events.asug.com/Default.aspx?alias=events.asug.com/businessobjects

If you are attending the conference, hope to see you there. Shoot me an email or tweet me if you want to meetup.

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Posted on January 9, 2011 by admin

First Post!

Hey everyone,

This site will be used to help all analysts become better at their craft by understanding the source where the data resides and how to manipulate it.  I hope you enjoy this site and use it as a resource to become a better analyst.

Enjoy!

Hope to be making my first contribution soon.

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Posted on January 7, 2011 by admin

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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