You can read about them on blogs and social media. You can hear about them at industry conferences. You might even talk about them at your company’s water cooler. The developments coming for SAP BusinessObjects Analysis have gotten people’s attention.

“It’s changing dramatically,” Dr. Bjarne Berg says about the shift in the software as the industry greets the release BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) 4.0, under which BusinessObjects falls. Berg is vice president of information technologies at Comerit, Inc., and an expert on BI.

The latest version of BusinessObjects Analysis (formerly known in various iterations as Voyager, Pioneer, and Advanced Analysis) is the replacement technology for BEx Analyzer, and became available for general purchase in February 2011. “There’s a huge, pent-up interest and demand for this,” Berg says. “This tool is truly ready for prime time.”

SAP will continue to support BEx features as part of BusinessObjects BI 4.0, too.

Those familiar with BEx who have started or may soon use BusinessObjects Analysis will encounter an easy transition, as users will be able to work on the newer application within a few hours of installing it, he says. There are two versions of BusinessObjects Analysis:

• BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office, which offers analytical reporting tools within Microsoft Office Excel and PowerPoint
• BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP, which provides an option for browser-based data navigation that features a high level of interaction with limited formatting options

Direct Queries are a ‘Big Deal’

With BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office, you now can run queries directly through Microsoft PowerPoint instead of having to cut and paste queries from Microsoft Excel. “That is a really big deal,” Berg says. To run BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office:

• You need SAP NetWeaver BW 7.x (enhancement pack 1 or SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 preferred); however, queries defined as BEx 3.5 also work
• For the Excel interface, you need Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, or 2010
• For the PowerPoint interface, you need Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010
• You need BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 (minimum, BI 4.0 preferred) 

BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office also allows native connectivity through BI consumer services connectors, which is a great performance benefit, Berg says. In other words, the Microsoft version can connect directly with SAP NetWeaver BW queries, as well as through queries in a BusinessObjects universe, queries in MicroSoft LiveOffice, and Query as a Web Service. You no longer need to connect through MDX or OLAP universes for queries. “That is a very cool feature,” Berg says.

Additional Features to Note

Other important points about using BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office:

• With the Microsoft version, you can migrate your BEx Analyzer workbooks to the newer application.
• You do not need to convert existing BEx queries into another format. Instead, you can simply pick up those existing queries through BusinessObjects Analysis (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Select a BEx query in SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Microsoft Excel

• If you install SAP BI 4.0, of which BusinessObjects Analysis is a part, users can share Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, and connections. Smaller installations can skip the BusinessObjects Enterprise environment and access SAP NetWeaver BW directly for BusinessObjects Analysis, but in such cases every user must have a GUI installed on each machine and connections must be made for each client machine.

Realistically, if your company has more than a couple of BusinessObjects Analysis users, you should use a full-blown BI 4.0 installation, Berg says.

BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius dashboards) is also part of the BI 4.0 release. See the sidebar below for Berg’s thoughts on effective dashboards.

Control the Amount of Information You Put on Dashboards

Don’t make your BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius dashboards) into an all-in-one Swiss Army knife. While dashboards are great avenues to information, avoid the temptation to put every piece of information or every feature onto them, says Dr. Bjarne Berg, vice president of information technologies at Comerit, Inc. Instead, create user-friendly dashboards that perform well. Figure A shows a sample layout for a dashboard:

Figure A

A sample dashboard layout

If you administer or use a dashboard that takes more than 20 seconds to load, you have a problem, Berg says, citing research from Paul Strupp, a senior analytics product manager at Research in Motion and formerly a senior Web analyst at Oracle. In fact, research shows that after 14 seconds of loading, 50 percent of ad-hoc users have clicked the back button or left your site. After 21 seconds, another 50 percent of the remaining users have dropped out. Few people stick around to view a dashboard after that point, and eventually they stop using it altogether. Instead, they opt to run only those reports they know are needed. In such cases, those people use your system only for reporting and not analysis and exploration, Berg says.

To keep performance sharp, Berg suggests setting up dashboards that feature links into canned Web Intelligence reports. These reports offer pre-run information that users don’t change and provide limited filtering abilities (e.g., filter by sales volume by trade channel and total amount sold). If you use four different dashboards, you might consider placing five relevant canned Web Intelligence reports under each dashboard, for a total of 20 Web Intelligence reports, Berg says. This arrangement lets users drill down to details while keeping performance levels reasonable, he adds.

Scott Wallask

Scott Wallask was the managing editor for the BI, BusinessObjects, and HANA content of SAPexperts. He has covered SAP for WIS since May 2010, with a focus on SAP NetWeaver BW, HANA, BusinessObjects, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and human resources. He has spent 19 years as a writer and editor, including stints as a reporter at several newspapers in the Boston area. For 12 years starting in 1998, he created in-depth content about fire safety and OSHA regulations in hospitals while working at HCPro, a healthcare publishing company. In 2005, he won a first place award for best instructional reporting from the Specialized Information Publishers Association for his series on fire protection efforts in nursing homes. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern University in 1994 with a BA degree in print journalism.

You may contact the author at editor@biexpertonline.com.

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