SAP Lumira 2.0 – Some new insights

SAP Lumira 2.0 was announced earlier this year as the successor to SAP Lumira 1.x and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.6. But, apart from a few screenshots and roadmap slides I hadn’t seen much of this new version yet. Luckily there was a SAP Partner update webinar last Friday that gave some more insights and even showed a short demo of the new Lumira 2.0. At TechEd Las Vegas this week probably the same information will be shared.

First, the release of Lumira 2.0 is postponed and is now expected to be somewhere late Q2/early Q3 2017. As Lumira 1.x and Design Studio 1.6 won’t get any new features, I’d guess we can only expect some minor patch releases the coming year until 2.0 is GA. Reason for the delay is that the current product quality is not up to par and SAP doesn’t want to limit the scope for the 2.0 release. This means that the agile development/release approach we have seen for the past years on Lumira is now put on hold.

Next we already knew that Lumira 2.0 is a convergence of Lumira and Design Studio. There will be one product (Lumira), with two user interfaces (Designer and Discovery) using common technology. I still haven’t seen any real interoperability between the tools/interfaces, so I’m still curious what the exact advantage for the user would be here. From an BI admin perspective we’ll get a single BI Platform add-on, instead of the separate ones we now have for Lumira and Design Studio.

Below are some slides regarding Lumira Discovery, mostly showing user interface/experience changes/improvements.

Then the Lumira Designer, which I am the most curious about of course. Here are my highlights/notes, below are again a bunch of slides with some more details.

User-defined components: Developers can now create reusable components themselves, using other default components, scripting and data binding. This will be a huge productivity gainer! You can for example create a custom KPI tile once, combining a few text components, some icons and maybe a chart, and reuse this exact setup throughout your applications. Very nice addition!

Bookmarks: Completely reworked bookmark concept, which allows the developer to determine what is exactly captured in a bookmark (for example a specific component or variable, instead of the whole application).

Visualizations: A lot of improvements in Crosstab/Spreadsheet and Infochart components. Crosstab conditional formatting can finally be configured in the Designer client. ESRI maps are now the default baseman in the Geomap component.

Adaptive Layout container: This component will finally enable some responsive design of Lumira apps that need to be used on different devices (desktop, tablet, mobile). It works like a grid component that changes the cell layout dependent on the screen setup.

Commentary: Yes finally commentary will be available! This probably works in the same way as commentary in Webi on BI4.2.

Windows Mobile: Bad news for those of you still using Windows Mobile. There is no business case to create a version of the SAP BusinessObjects Mobile app for the Windows Mobile platform, probably because nobody uses it.

RoamBI: No integration for Lumira and RoamBI is planned, at least not for 2017.

Scheduling: It is on the roadmap, but with very low priority. Don’t expect it for the end of 2017, it will probably be much later.

IBCS (Hichert): IBCS certification for Hichert-style visualizations is not in scope yet.

HackingSAP.com - Sep 18, 2016 | SAP Lumira