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!

Posted in: Knowledge sharing, New technology, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, Twitter, Xcelsius

Bye bye Xcelsius, Hello SAP Crystal Solutions?

Last week SAP introduced a new product name for its reporting and dashboarding tooling portfolio: SAP Crystal Solutions. Unfortunately the Xcelsius brand name will completely disappear. Xcelsius Present will be SAP Crystal Presentation Design and Xcelsius Engage should be called SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition from now on.

Uh right. Why didn’t they just name it SAP Crystal Xcelsius?

In the table below an overview of the old and new names is shown:

Old Name	New Name
Crystal Reports	SAP Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010	SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010
Crystal Reports for Eclipse	SAP Crystal Reports for Eclipse
Crystal Reports Viewer	SAP Crystal Reports viewer
Crystal Reports Server	SAP Crystal Reports Server
Crystal Reports Visual Advantage	SAP Crystal Reports Dashboard Design package
Crystal Reports Developer Advantage	SAP Crystal Reports runtime server license
Xcelsius Present	SAP Crystal Presentation Design
Xcelsius Engage	SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, personal edition

Get more information from this blog.

Posted in: SAP, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, Xcelsius

Xcelsius: Using the Push Button for data input

Xcelsius is a great tool to build interactive what-if scenarios based on MS Excel models. We recently got a request to build such a dashboard and one of the user interface requirements was that the user should be able to change a value by clicking something like a +/- button. Clicking the plus had to increase the value with 1, and clicking the min had to decrease it with 1.

Luckily, Xcelsius provides us the Spinner component. This would have been a good and easy solution, if another requirement wouldn’t have been that the dashboard had to be used on a (multi)touch screen. Touch means big buttons for user input and as you can see on the right, the Spinner component is way too detailed. So we needed something else to do the job.

To solve this we used the new Push Button components. The Push Button simply does what its name says and pushes a value from a source cell to a destination cell. To solve our little problem we used two of these Push Buttons and some basic MS Excel logic.

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Posted in: DIY, Knowledge sharing, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, Xcelsius

More HTG from SAP: Setting up authorization for Xcelsius in SAP BW

SAP really is on a roll this month, publishing just another how-to guide on Xcelsius and SAP BW. This time the HTG covers the creation of authorization objects/roles that are required to view/create/change/deploy Xcelsius dashboards. This is now possible with the new authorization object for Xcelsius dashboards: “S_RS_XCLS”.

You can get this HTG here.

Posted in: Knowledge sharing, SAP, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BW, Xcelsius

More HTG from SAP: Xcelsius transports in SAP BW

As mentioned in the previous post, with the new SAP BW integration in Xcelsius (Xcelsius 2008 sp2 or higher) we now have the possibility to use some features of SAP BW directly. We can now publish a Xcelsius dashboard back to the BW system and store it as an object (of type XCLS) in the BW system. These XCLS-objects could be transported to different system in the landscape, in the same way as any other standard BW objects (InfoCube, DataStore Objects etc).

SAP published a how-to guide on this subject. Get it here.

Posted in: Knowledge sharing, SAP, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BW, Xcelsius