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…)

#Juice30days Fav Five

This month I’ve been following the #Juice30days guide by Juice Analytics to learn more on data visualization. You really should check their cool website and blog and follow the 30 days program. They are doing a great job setting this up. I put my Fav Five content in this post.

1. A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use

This 3-part white paper  gives us best practices and guidelines on how to create and design better dashboards.

Part 1: Foundation helps you identify your target audience, understand what type of dashboard you want to create and why it is valuable to your organization. It concludes guidance regarding how to focus your message on the information and metrics that matter.

Part 2: Structure helps you start on designing your dashboard, including what form it should take, how to design for audience understanding, and what navigation, interactions, and capabilities will make your dashboard useful and engaging.

Finally, Part 3: Information Design dives into the details of interface and information design. You will learn how to lay out your dashboard and best practices for charting and data presentation.

2.  Who is Edward Tufte?

I knew about this guy, but hadn’t read a lot of his work yet. So this story resulted in a very large and expensive Amazon.com visit…

3.  5 Phases of Data Analytics Maturation: Part 1 & 2

I found this article very fun to read since I could plot the stages exactly to the environments at the clients I work(ed) for, especially the Tribal Elders phase, which is – sadly enough – still reality.

In this article the 5 different stages of maturity that information workers go through as they try to become more effective and efficient at consuming and acting on information are explored.

Phase 1: Tribal Elders

Phase 2: Static Reports

Phase 3: Bigger Static Reports

Phase 4: Ad-hoc reports

Phase 5: Experienced Guide

4. Before trying to communicate information, first understand it.

When thinking about information, don’t confuse the medium with the message. Watch it:

5.  30 Resources to Find the Data you Need

Need some data for your latest demo dashboard or report? This list has some nice sources to get you started.

SAP Crystal Dashboard and Presentation Design (Xcelsius) Cookbook

I am very excited to announce the SAP Crystal Dashboard and Presentation Design Cookbook I am currently working on together with co-author David Lai. The book is scheduled to be published by Packt Publishing in the first half of 2011.

The cool thing about this book is that it is indeed structured as a cookbook. In at least 75 practical recipes we will show in a step-by-step approach and supported by a large number of screenshots how to create advanced dashboards using the SAP Crystal Dashboard and Presentation Design software, formerly known as Xcelsius.

Besides covering the functionality and working of components, data connections, dynamic visibility, alerts and dashboard publishing we will also discuss some of the top add-ons and provide best practices on dashboard development. This setup makes the book a nice read for both beginners and the more experienced users.

Since the book is currently under development it has the RAW (Read As we Write) status at Packt Publishing, which means that the all material that is written until now is already available in e-book format. We aim to publish the book in May 2011.

Update May 2011: The book has been released as the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 cookbook. You can find more information here.

New GMaps Plugin v2 for Xcelsius try-out

This summer Centigon Solutions released the latest version of their Google Maps add-on for Xcelsius (uh, SAP Crystal Solutions Presentation Design…). Although I liked the first version of this add-on, I really missed an option for showing regional alerts. You still had to use the standard Xcelsius map-components which did support this feature.

In this post I will show the steps you have to take to create a dashboard showing a Google Map with regions that have alert colors and are clickable with some drill-down functionality like the example below.

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Twitter, Flash & HTML5

Twitter is great. It keeps me up-to-date on what is happening in the world and nowadays I get my information directly from the source! The added value of  those traditional, old-school newspaper/TV  journalists is decreasing day by day. This is a good thing. I see most journalists as nothing more than a filter, tweaking their opinions into the real facts. With Twitter the people that I see as important or interesting are the modern journalists. They are my personal groups of journalists. And if they don’t deliver quality, I just unfollow them.

Tonight I read two nice tweets. First I learned that someone wrote an app/hack to use flash on the iPhone/iPad (iOS). If this thing really works this would be great news for dashboard development with Xcelsius SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition. Finally the development of dashboards for the iPhone and iPad could begin. Let’s hope so. Here is the article with the video ‘proof’.

Next I read a tweet about the differences between Adobe Flash and HTML5. Apple favours HTML5 and gives a nice showcase on its website (Safari 5 required). But what exactly is HTML5 and how can Flash and HTML5 be compared? Focus published this cool A4-sized overview.

Thanks for tweeting!