Book review: Reporting and Analysis with SAP BusinessObjects

For the past months I’ve been busy reading (and listening) a bunch of interesting tech books so it’s time for another review. It looks like SAP Press is updating its book portfolio this year, since after the Integrating SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.x with SAP Netweaver book I posted about in January we now also have a second edition of Reporting and Analysis with SAP BusinessObjects, and in April the successor to Creating Dashboards with SAP BusinessObjects is planned for release.

This is a good thing. We’ve seen lots of changes in just a few years; BI4 has been release, new product names are introduced, integration has been improved and so on. If you are just entering the new SAP BusinessObjects world and you would follow the ‘old’ books and documentation it would only get you confused and probably frustrated. We don’t need that. The book is updated for release 4.0 FP3.

So let’s have a look at this new Reporting and Analysis with SAP BusinessObjects book, which is again written by Ingo Hilgefort, who is one of the ultimate gurus on SAP BusinessObjects and SAP BW tooling and integration and has been blogging and writing books on these topics since SAP acquired BusinessObjects a few years back. Follow this guy if you want to keep updated and learn more.

This book is really an overall overview of the complete SAP BusinessObjects reporting portfolio. It starts with the basics by describing the different reporting capabilities in just a few pages. A lot of SAP BI consultants still can’t name the five main BI tooling areas so there is nothing wrong to start with this again. (more…)

Lifehack: Audiobooks

When the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson was announced I instantly pre-ordered it for my Kindle. I’ve read numerous books on Apple and Steve Jobs before, but none of them were authorized by Jobs. So I was excited to finally get the complete story. But when the book got released in November ’11 I tried to read it, but just couldn’t get into it. The book starts a bit slow, I already knew most of the early stories and maybe most important I just didn’t have the time to read for a while.

That’s when I tried audiobooks. I’ve seen those Harry Potter 20-cd packs at bookstores selling for over €50,- so I never looked further into this medium before. But after a quick web search I found Audible, an online audiobook mp3 store, owned by Amazon. Audible has this neat promo which gives you 2 free audiobooks upon registering without charging your creditcard!

So I downloaded the Steve Jobs book to listen in my car to try this concept. As I drive for over 2 hours each day I already listen a lot to BNR FM Radio (10% news, 10% traffic updates, 40% commercials, 40% boring bs blah), a selection of weekly podcasts and of course Spotify. Now, a few weeks later, the FM radio time has been minimized and mostly been replaced by a range of cool audiobooks.

Listening to somebody telling you a story is easy, takes almost no effort and is very relaxing. While listening you can think about the story instead of being annoyed by radio DJ’s and commercials. This made my daily car rides way more efficient. I recommend you to check this out too. Go to Audible, get the free books and give it a try.

By the way, the Steve Jobs biography was superb! What a great story and I even got some great new insights out of it!

New Book: Integrating SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.x with SAP NetWeaver

SAP Press recently released Integrating SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.x with SAP NetWeaver by Ingo Hilgefort. This book is the successor to the 2009 Integrating SAP Business Objects XI 3.1 BI Tools with SAP NetWeaver and is now updated with content on the latest SAP BusinessObjects 4 (BI4) release.

In this book Hilgefort explains how we can setup the (new) BI4 platform on top of a SAP BW or SAP ECC environment. He does this by covering the complete implementation cycle: First he goes through the installation steps for the SAP BusinessObjects server and client tools (Crystal Reports, Dashboards, Live Office, Analysis and the BI Platform Client tools like the Universe Designer and the Information Design Tool). This is done in a very detailed step-by-step manner, discussing every installer screen that will appear in the process. This really is very helpful the first time you have to do this! This extremely detailed approach is followed throughout the whole book.

Each front-end tool has a chapter dedicated to it in which the several data connectivity scenarios are discussed for the specific tool. These chapters all have the following approach: First all possible connectivity options are discussed. As you can see the overview figure for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) now really has become art.

Next the supported and unsupported SAP BW elements are shown in a table for each connectivity option. Also a metadata mapping is given for the BEx Query elements, showing for example how a navigational attribute or variable is treated by the front-end tool. I also like the translations of the terms used in SAP BusinessObjects, like Key figure becomes Measure and Variable is called Prompt. All these overviews make things very clear.

To get you started these chapters all have a Create your first report section, that shows you step-by-step how you can create a simple report with each tool and how to set up the several connections. Again, a lot of screenshots are used here so even if you haven’t worked with some of the tools yet, you will learn fast on how to configure the data connection. Good stuff!

Live Office and BI Web Services (QaaWS) haven’t been forgotten. There roles have become less important with the new connectivity options in BI4 but they can still be used. Hilgefort discusses this situation and shows how to use them in combination with Dashboards. The book finishes with chapters on report publications and SAP Portal integration, which makes this book very very complete.

Just like all the other books written by Ingo Hilgefort you really should pick up this one! Not only as a reference guide but also to go through the step-by-step sections to get a good understanding of the several connectivity options when integration BI4 with SAP. Also make sure you check his site/blog which is totally dedicated to the SAP BI integration subject.

SAP BI Bookstore.com

Last week I added a little section to this site called the SAP BI Bookstore.com. Keeping the old list I had with SAP BI related books and publications up to date was a bit too time consuming (yeah bit lazy IK), so I switched it to an Amazon aStore which does most of the work for me now.  For your convenience I put the books in logical categories. You can reach the page by going to www.sapbibookstore.com or by clicking the link in the top-right corner of this blog.

I might bring back the page with all the SAP BI related links to blogs, sites, videos, tools etc. but I have to update them first. In the meantime you could check the resources list at EverythingXcelsius.

Book review: Discover ABAP

I have been working with SAP BW for some years now and ABAP coding has always been a pain in the ass for me. Fact is, also within BW you can’t really get around without any ABAP knowledge. It is used to enhance data extractors, to transform the data within the BW data model (with the start, field, end and expert routines in transformations) and to create variables to make dynamic selections in queries, DTP’s and InfoPackages.

So most of the time I just looked at some pieces of existing code, copied it, searched Google or SAP Help, tweaked it a bit so it eventually did what I wanted it to do, and went on. Just like I managed to do this with html, php and other coding languages for the last 15 years. If things got too complex I turned to a ABAP-consultant who normally managed to solve these problems in a few minutes doing some magic tricks that always seem simple when you read the code afterwards.

Now I found this book Discover ABAP by Karl-Heinz Kühnhauser ($39,95) which promises to give you a 101 course on the ABAP basics for us n00bs, so I decided to try it. Although this book is on the market for a few years already I still want to acknowledge it here.

This book is easy to read, gives many many examples, explains every concept in details and keeps things simple to understand. Kühnhauser demonstrates how to get the data from tables, use variables, transform or modify values, make calculations with them, use internal tables and how to set up logical expressions. Furthermore the Function Modules are discussed and the book shows how you can use them in your code.

I think that over 70% of the book’s text consist of examples or explaining them (line by line!!) which is very important for newcomers. All features of the ABAP editor are explained and it shows you how to really use the Debugger.

Since I only want to use ABAP in the BW domain (no, I don’t have any ambition to be a ABAP programmer someday!) I could fast-read/skip most of the sections on the data dictionary, creating database tables and building selection screens. But I think still 80%+ of the book was useful for me.

The only thing I miss in this book is the follow up advice on where to go next if you want to learn more. But if you are curious about the basics of ABAP you should check out this book for sure!