SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
Design Studio updated roadmap January 2014
SAP put a new and updated version of the Design Studio roadmap online last week. These roadmaps are publicly available via the SAP Road Maps page on the SAP Service Marketplace: http://service.sap.com/roadmap.
A product road map describes how the feature/function capabilities in an SAP product or technology are planned to progress over time, in general:
- Today = changes in the current release version, which is Design Studio 1.2.
- Planned Innovations = changes planned in upcoming development releases (next 12-18 months).
- Future Direction = proposed themes for a product or technology beyond the planned releases.
Let’s have a look at it.
The long announced Integrated Planning (IP) feature will arrive soon in Design Studio. This will make Design Studio not only an analytical tool but also a tool to create a nice interface for some data input. This is also a feature that never made it to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.
Next, the back-end updates for the HANA and SAP BW platform will get those deployment options up to par with the BI4 Platform. I’m not sure if this also means that HANA and SAP BW will enable mobile Design Studio applications. Don’t think so.
The other planned innovations are nice increments, although I have no idea what they mean with Advanced scripting.
The big change with the previous roadmaps is the planning for three important and much requested features: Context menu, Drag and Drop and Report-to-Report Interface (RRI). These two features made the old BEx Web Application Designer a real analytical web tool.
With the context menu you could change for example the number of decimals shown, switch between keys and texts, set filters, add dimensions and so on. This was quite powerful in combination with drag and drop t0 edit your result set table. In Web Intelligence, Analysis, Lumira and other BI tools we are also used to work like that. With these options Design Studio would get really close to being the ultimate BI tool.
Also the Report-to-Report Interface (RRI) seems to be postponed. With RRI we could jump from a report to other reports, while taking the filter settings of the start report with us to the other report(s). It’s somewhat the BEx variant of OpenDocument.
So yes, I’m a quite disappointed about these features being pushed back on the release calendar. I have some customers that are eagerly waiting for this so they can finally ditch their old BEx Web Application Designer reports. Now we have to find some creative workarounds to get to the desired functionality.
For reference, the old roadmap (SAP TechEd 2013):
Design Studio accepted ideas for next release(s)
SAP has this Idea Place website set up where users can submit ideas for new features or actually any change to an SAP product. Very few people know this but this site is actually quite useful. Users can vote and comment on each other’s ideas and the top ideas will be taken into consideration by the project team.
There is also a place for Design Studio ideas. At the moment the submission for new ideas is closed. As you can see in the schedule below they are now in the Development phase of the current cycle, so I assume the ideas that now have the Accepted status will appear in the upcoming 1.3 release.
Design Studio Idea phases and schedule (source):
Submission: June 1st – September 30th
- Customers can begin submitting ideas
- Idea Status is ‘Submitted’
- Can vote on ideas now
Voting: October 1st – October 6th
- Final idea submissions must be in for consideration in next release.
- Customers vote on top ideas
- Idea Status is ‘Submitted’
Review: October 7th – November 4th
- SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio Team reviews top voted ideas for next release
- Ideas can continue to be submitted, however these will be considered for a later release.
- Idea Status changed to ‘Under Review’
Development: November 4th
- Development begins (estimated < 8 months)
- Selected ideas will receive ‘Accepted’ status, others will be identified as ‘Not Planned by SAP’ or moved back to ‘Submitted’ for consideration in a later release.
Use: Q2 2014
- Release deployed with select ideas
- Ideas in new release status changed to ‘Delivered’
So I checked the list of Accepted ideas and there are some pretty interesting ones in it:
- Toggle Button component
- Drag & Drop dimensions (already in roadmap)
- Browser based multi-languages
- Personalization/Bookmarks (already in roadmap)
- Turn on/off display attributes
- Totals Display (show/hide)
- Open Scripting Editor with double-click on component
- Upload filter values via clipboard
- Set Sort Order for Data in Tables and Charts via Scripting
- Add/remove members to .getMemberlist() result
- Set display and text type via scripting
- Timer based screen change
- Enable HTML components in Design Studio
Ordering Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio book in Europe
I got some questions about ordering the Getting Started with SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio book. The website I normally refer to – SAP-Press.com – ships the book globally, but if you are not in the U.S. or Canada the shipping costs are pretty high. I you order a single book they may be as high as the price of the book itself!
SAP Press even acknowledges this in its FAQ:
For most international shipments, customers can optimize the shipping cost per book by ordering more than one book at a time. We recommend that you test different quantities in your shopping cart in order to determine the most cost effective way to proceed, or consult with one of our customer service specialists.
Mmkay… Luckily the are also some cheaper options to get the book in Europe:
- The Netherlands & Belgium: Bol.com – €59,99 – free shipping
- Germany & Austria: SAP-Press.de – €69,95 – free shipping
- Luxemburg & Switzerland: Amazon.de – €69,95 – free shipping
- United Kingdom: Amazon.co.uk – £47,99 – free shipping
- Other European countries: Amazon.de – €69,95 plus shipping (€3,25 – €9,50)
Design Studio add-ons: Graphomate Charts 2.0
2014 is going to be a big year for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, especially since the recent 1.2 version of Design Studio offers an SDK to create custom components. I expect to see a lot of cool new add-ons in the coming year.
One of the first companies that created such an add-on is Graphomate from Germany. For SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards they already created the Visualization Add-on in the past, and now they made the same add-on available for Design Studio, called Graphomate Charts 2.0.
So what does this add-on offer? The Graphomate Charts lets you visualize data quickly according to the SUCCESS concept of Prof. Hichert. This SUCCESS concept is a set of rules for designing reports and presentations. More info can be found here and on Hichert.com.
The charts look very minimalistic and the emphasize is clearly on presenting differences and trends as clearly as possible. In fact, you can edit the looks of each element of a chart (color, filling, shape, width) independently. With the option to activate Deviation Axes you can add extra mini-charts above/besides the chart that display the deviation between two data series (percentage or absolute).
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
