Getting Started with Design Studio book now available (coupon code in post!)

Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is available for order right now! If you haven’t picked it up at the SAP Press book stand at SAP TechEd Las Vegas or Amsterdam you can get your copy now at SAP-Press.com. Make sure you use coupon code QR7N5G when finishing your order, which will give you a nice $10 discount. This offer is valid until December 31st, for any book format you choose (hardcover print or ebook).

So what can you expect from this title?

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is one of the youngest and most promising new toolsets in the SAP BusinessObjects product portfolio. It is being positioned by SAP as the primary tool for creating interactive analytical applications for the web and mobile devices. This book will help you to learn not only the technical ins and outs of this new tool, but also provide you with the required contextual knowledge to position Design Studio in your existing SAP BI landscape. By the way, don’t worry about the technical stuff. No pre-existing knowledge is required as we will walk you through every aspect of Design Studio in a step-by-step way, using a lot of screenshots.

The book starts with a broad overview of Design Studio. In the first chapters we introduce you to the product, compare it with other SAP (BI) products and discuss several use case scenarios.

Next we follow this by going through every detail of the application. First we walk you step-by-step through the installation procedure. Then we describe the application environment and the general process of building an application. Next we describe every available component and its properties in detail.

Once you have mastered the basics, we go into more depth about how you can enhance an application. We describe how you add interactivity and give you a set of guidelines for creating applications. We then walk you through the creation of two complex applications. The source files and code for these applications are available as a download.

I put the table of contents in the Read More section below this post so you can check the contents and structure in more detail. So have fun reading our book and let us know what you think. Also don’t forget to use the coupon code QR7N5G when ordering!

Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – Xavier Hacking and Jeroen van der A – SAP Press – ISBN: 978-1-59229-895-2

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Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio book

Wow, it’s not even three years ago that I announced the release of the SAP BusinessObjectsDashboards 4.0 Cookbook here at this place, and now I can already announce a second book I worked on: Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, which will be published by SAP Press. This time I teamed up with my Interdobs colleague Jeroen van der A to write this book.

As the title already indicates this new book is all about one of the youngest SAP BusinessObjects tools: Design Studio. Design Studio offers a toolset to create interactive analytical applications and dashboards on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA data sources. The apps we can create with this tool are fully HTML5 compatible and can therefor be run on any device. Design Studio is also introduced by SAP as the successor of the current BEx Web Application Designer and SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius).

At the moment the book is going through its final edits and reviews. Our goal is to have it available just in time for SAP TechEd Las Vegas, which is at the end of October. When the final edits are done I will post some more information on the exact contents of the book.

Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – SAP Press
ISBN: 978-1-59229-895-2

Wish I could share my espresso beans with @Hyronimous and @xjhacking, who have devoted many a late night to this: http://t.co/Toeb8164Au

— Kelly Grace Weaver (@kellygweaver) September 6, 2013

@Hyronimous Looking forward to giving you your weekends back VERY soon!! 🙂

— Kelly Grace Weaver (@kellygweaver) September 7, 2013

Remember that Design Studio book I teased? You should probably check it out. http://t.co/Toeb8164Au

— Kelly Grace Weaver (@kellygweaver) August 29, 2013

Book review: Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP with SAP NetWeaver BW

SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP is probably the one BI4 tool I have spent the least time in yet. It can be seen as the successor to the BEx Web Analyzer and it is the web counterpart of SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Office.

For my projects this might be a very useful tool to offer to our users since it is fully integrated in the BI Launchpad platform and doesn’t require any locally installed software (in contrast to the Office edition, which uses an MS Excel plugin).

Ingo Hilgefort wrote an eBook that is fully dedicated to Analysis OLAP in combination with SAP BW as a data source: Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP with SAP NetWeaver BW.

I picked up the Kindle edition at Amazon.com which was quite cheap at $14,51. I think if you are living in the USA the price will be even lower (around $10) due to ‘some’ taxes we have to pay in the European Union. Anyway, with or without taxes this obviously is no money for this kind of content.

After positioning the tool within the SAP BusinessObjects BI portfolio and discussing the data connectivity options the book quickly dives into the details. Since it is focussed on SAP BW environments as a datasource only, literally all the BW and BEx stuff is discussed: BEx Query elements, variable types, hierarchical functionality and so on. For every one of these features it is stated how Analysis OLAP supports it. Also some comparisons are made with the BEx Web Analyzer and Analysis Office.

Next the book demonstrates in a step-by-step manner the features of Analysis OLAP. Here a load of screenshots are used, so it is very clear what you have to do. I didn’t have access to an environment with Analysis OLAP when reading the book but with the clear texts and figures I could easily follow what was happening. The book ends with a chapter on deployment of Analysis OLAP which gives some interesting performance tweaking tips.

I got the book on my Kindle, which is a small device and has no colors. A lot of tables are used in the book and the formatting of them gets messed-up on my Kindle. The screenshots are also quite hard to view. Luckily I can also use the Kindle app on my Mac to view the details. Unfortunately the indexing from chapter 4 and up doesn’t work. So you have to scroll page by page to the right section if you want to look up something in stead of just clicking the section in the table of contents. Hopefully Ingo will fix this and also keep updating the contents of the book every time a new service pack is released. Good stuff!

Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP with SAP NetWeaver BW [Kindle Edition] by Ingo Hilgefort.

Getting into SAP HANA (part 3): SAP HANA Starter book

Last year I got a bit stuck when playing around with the SAP HANA Studio on our Amazon AWS HANA setup. In the meanwhile a great book (SAP HANA: An Introduction) has been published providing all the ins-and-outs of HANA. This book is on the #1 best-seller spot at SAP Press for months now!

Time to get some actual hands-on experience with those Analtyic views and Calculated attributes. I found this book called SAP HANA Starter by Mark Walker, which appeared to be an extremely practical guide to get you started with HANA and let you learn the basics of the SAP HANA Studio tool.

The book starts with a basic intro to HANA, including some explanation on the column-based database. This is all very very short, but that’s okay because the purpose of this book is to give some practical guidance, not all the theory. Next the book takes you through the installation, the setup of SAP HANA Studio itself and finally a big example scenario is followed. This is all done in a step-by-step manner, supported with a lot of screenshots.

What I really like about the demo scenario that is worked out throughout the book is that you don’t have to set up things like a connected source database or an additional tool like Data Services or so to get started. The book show you how to create some new tables and how to use some SQL statements to create some demo data yourself. Based on these tables a scenario is followed in which objects like the analytic view, attribute view, filters, calculated attribute, graphical calculation view and so on are discussed and created step-by-step. If you follow all the steps, in the end the result of your ‘HANA application’  can be presented through MS Excel.

SAP HANA Starter is a very to the point and hands-on ebook and will be useful for you if you are a SAP HANA Studio first timer. The book has about 50 pages of content which will keep you busy for a sunday afternoon. The ebook is priced around $9,-, which is just good value.

SAP HANA Starter by Mark Walker, ISBN 9781849688680.

2012 in books

2012 must be the year I read more than any other year. The amount of material I had to read for university isn’t coming close for sure.  I thought it would be fun to go through my Amazon/Kindle/Audible/SAP-Press/Bol.com accounts and share some of the most interesting books I came accross this year.

Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson

This is the first audiobook I listened to in my car driving between home and work. This book was one of those listens you’d wish the drive would be a bit longer so you could listen some more. Even though I already knew most of the stories on Apple and Steve Jobs, especially on the era until 1998, I got a bunch of new insights and ideas from this great book. I also read Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky, but that is more fanboy stuff providing a little look behind the scenes of Apple Inc.

How an economy grows and why it crashes – Peter Schiff

I read a lot of books on economics and politics this year in an attempt to better understand what the hell is going on exactly with this ongoing world-wide economical disaster we are in. Think about it. How many people really know how our system works, where the money comes from and how things like inflation work? This is a very fun book on how an economy works and at what moment it starts to fail. It tells the story of an island with a small population where one of the islanders developed an advanced fishing device (a net). With the net he could catch more fish than he needed to stay alive and he got time to do other things than fishing. And so an economy was born…

No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails – But Individuals Succeed  – John Stossel

It was a great year for freedom politics. Ron Paul got mainstream attention and the LP even got over 1 million votes in the US Presidential elections! Who would have thought a few years ago. A cool book on big government influence on our (personal) freedom is this one by John Stossel. Stossel debunks a lot of myths with some insights I hadn’t heard before, like for example the one on having a minimum wage, which actually makes people poorer. Interesting stuf!

De kracht van scrum (The power of scrum) – Rini van Solingen

Of course I heard about scrum before and I even participated a bit in a project some years ago that used this methodology. But I still hadn’t seen a completed overview of what scrum really was and how it exactly works. This book is easy, fun and fast to read because it uses a short real life story to explain the steps of the methodology and the new roles for the project team members.

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