Xcelsius
Xcelsius/SAP BW direct connection HTG
With the Xcelsius 2008 sp2 release last year SAP now offers a direct data connection between Xcelsius and SAP BW queries. This is a huge improvement knowing that until this release we needed the BusinessObjects Enterprise, the Universe and QAAWS or Live Office to get our data from SAP BW into Xcelsius dashboards.
SAP published a nice how-to guide, including all pre-requisites needed to setup a connection, a list of BEx query features that do or do not work in Xcelsius and lots of tips and best practices. A must read!
Get it here.
Posted in: Knowledge sharing, SAP, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BW, XcelsiusThe Xcelsius feel good movie
Watch this cool propaganda marketing video on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius 2008 featuring Ryan Goodman of Centigon Solutions and others discussing the benefits of the (growing) Xcelsius universe. I really really like Xcelsius, but customers should be aware that just acquiring Xcelsius won’t bring you much more success. It will require at least a solid and well structured back-end datawarehouse, excellent dashboard requirements gathering and a sophisticated user interface design. So make sure the conditions are right, and Xcelsius will indeed enable you to get better insights and make better decisions. Have fun!
Posted in: SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, XcelsiusThoughts on Xcelsius 2008 SP3
Santa Claus arrived early this year, with SAP BusinessObjects delivering the third servicepack for Xcelsius 2008. Great! The Xcelsius community seems to be extremely excited about this release according to all the positive tweets and blogs. You can download Xcelsius 2008 here and find all the information on what’s fixed and what’s new here.
But hey, wait a minute. Those Sparklines, Bullet-charts, Scorecards, the Chart Slider, Advanced Labeling which all comes with SP3, I have seen all of this before somewhere. Actually, I already had a lot of this functionality in my Xcelsius SP2 installation, due to some excellent third-party Xcelsius add-ons. See some examples below. On the left side the ‘new’ Xcelsius components, on the right side the ‘old’ third-party add-ons.
So what is the message that SAP gives us – and more important: the small group of Xcelsius add-on developers – with this release? Looking at this free ‘service pack’ I don’t see why anyone would consider investing a lot of time, effort and money in developing Xcelsius add-ons, knowing that SAP maybe will integrate your ideas or solutions in their own product, and give it away for free. I remember the case where Apple introduced its ‘innovative’ Dashboard, while third-party app Konfabulator already did the same thing years before. Maybe I’m just whining about nothing and is this just what big companies do all the time, but with the very limited number of active developers for Xcelsius add-ons, I think this approach maybe not the best way to go.
Powerpoint, Xcelsius and Twitter DIY
A few weeks ago Timo Elliot (SAP BusinessObjects) launched his free PowerPoint Twitter Tools on his SAP web 2.0 blog. With these tools you are able to integrate Twitter in you presentations and use it i.e. to receive live feedback during your presentation. Lots of updates and improvements have been published since then and the high number of positive comments (on Twitter) confirm what a great idea this is.
A drawback of the tool is that you can’t configure the layout yourself. Also there is a SAP logo on every slide plus the e-mail address of the author. I like SAP but I think it is a bad thing to stuff your slides with logo’s. Also, why would your audience care?
So, let’s build a custom Twitter tool for PowerPoint ourselves, step-by-step.
Requirements:
– A copy of Xcelsius Engage or Xcelsius Engage Server (get a free 30-day trial here);
– MS Excel;
– MS Powerpoint.
