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QlikView Next front-end vs SAP BusinessObjects Mobile
I just took the time to watch this video previewing QlikView Next. In the video a good preview is giving of what this new QlikView tool looks like and works, and it seems pretty cool. It also worries me when I look at the mobile BI solutions SAP is currently providing in the SAP BusinessObjects Mobile app.
If I understand it correctly Next is some kind of BI vision for the future, where they want users to move from passively receiving reports to more actively participating in analysis. They made a beautiful website for this, but I can’t really find out what the really big deal is here. Things like the Discover, Decide, Do cycle are not really groundbreaking or unique.
But, I can see from the video demo that the tool itself is purely developed from a user experience perspective and fully compatible for mobile usage. It runs in Safari on an iPad without having to install something. You can easily select data and use ‘natural’ gestures as pinching to zoom in on charts. I really like the way you can circle around a group of data points to select them.
The user can create new analyses himself by drag-and-dropping components (charts, filter boxes etc.). From these analyses a story can be composed, including written text. This storyboard can be distributed to others and from a datapoint in this storyboard a user can go back to the original (more detailed) analysis.
So let’s compare this to what SAP is offering in their SAP BusinessObjects Mobile app. The Mobile app can show predefined Webi, Crystal, Dashboards and Design Studio application. Except from some basic annotations and mailing screenshots there are no options to add information or adjust what you are seeing. The interactivity/usability options within the reports (making selections for example) are miles behind what QlikView Next is showing in the video demo.
I also tried SAP Lumira Cloud on the Mobile app. It let’s you create a single chart, add and move some dimensions and measures. You can even click one or more datapoints on the chart to filter, but this doesn’t work really smooth. Also pinching and swiping seems to have no effect. And I just can’t figure out how to add more charts and/or a storyboard. Frustrating.
Conclusion is that the SAP BusinessObjects Mobile app still sucks and there is a lot of work to do to close this gap. The problem is that the approach for the Mobile app always has been to make (existing) BI4 reports available on mobile devices, which led to crappy solutions. It is just like publishers trying to port their newspapers and magazines to the iPad, in the exact same format as the printed paper (see my Blendle post).
Instead, SAP should start all over again and recreate their Mobile app from a pure mobile usage perspective (and not just continue to port Lumira to the iPad!). Also for Design Studio we need upgraded components that include these cool mobile gesture features like smart data selections.
By the way thanks to @pieter_hendrikx for the tip on this QlikView Next video.
New SAPexperts article: How to Use CSS in Design Studio
I wrote another article for the SAPexperts online knowledge base. In line with some of my recent posts here on my blog this one is all about CSS, but now more from a basic, 101 course standpoint.
In this article I give a basic introduction to the language of CSS and explain how it can be used in combination with Design Studio, either on a local installation or with a connection to an SAP BusinessObjects BI4 platform or an SAP NetWeaver BW environment. I also discuss how you can change the default CSS styles of the standard Design Studio components.
If you have an subscription to the SAPexperts BI hub you can check the article here.
Custom Scrollbars in SAP Design Studio
As we have seen in an earlier post we can enhance the looks of our SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio applications with the use of some CSS coding. In this post I will show you how to add scrollbars to Design Studio components and how to change the looks of them. The result of an adjusted Text component will look like this:
Some components, like the Crosstab or the Filter Panel component will activate horizontal and/or vertical scrollbars themselves when there is not enough room to display all the data. The Text component doesn’t do this and just simply expands vertically. The height setting in the component’s layout properties has no effect on this anymore.
The future of reading is almost here
Just a few years ago I used to have a lot of subscription on monthly, weekly and daily magazines and newspapers. Yes the classic paper editions that were delivered at my home. There are a lot of problems with these ‘information’ products which eventually made me cancel everything.
The daily newspaper is of course always outdated, and I didn’t want to keep paying for the comics, some columns and the football (p)reviews. I tried the weekend edition, but the subjects of the deeper analyses articles seem to be chosen completely at random. It’s just a gamble what they come up with every edition. Bye bye Telegraaf and Financieel Dagblad.
I’ve read Elsevier, a big weekly magazine on politics and current affairs, for many many years. But, they got lazy with republishing some big multipage ‘stories’ every year (tips on doing your taxes around tax time, tips for your holiday around the summer etc.). The political news analyses are not really better than the ones you can find for free online and their tech articles are just a joke. Bye bye Elsevier.
I also had a subscription to the largest weekly football magazine in Holland (Voetbal International). Since a few years ago they have two 90 minute talkshows each week, which I can listen to for free while driving to work. Also the magazine mostly covers the bigger teams, in which I don’t have any interest. So bye bye VI.
But, once in a while these magazines or newspapers have one or even a few articles that I really do want to read. For example when the football magazine has a big article on my team. My strategy was to quickly read that specific article from the supermarket news stand during shopping and thus not paying for the €4 magazine. Not really a good strategy since I might miss some interesting articles and this only works with the magazines (and not with newspapers; too much hussle).
So luckily there now is something called Blendle. Blendle is a website that can be seen as an iTunes Music Store for articles. So how does it work? Blendle gives you access to (almost) all available magazines and newspapers in Holland. You can scroll through them and if you see an article that you like, just click it to read it. Each article has a price, mostly ranging from €0,10 to €0,25. So instead of buying a full magazine for maybe a few cool articles you can now just get that single specific piece you actually do want to read.
DIY CSS navigation buttons in SAP Design Studio
In SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio you can use the container components like a Tabstrip or a Pagebook to organize your application. The Tabstrip component already includes the tabs for navigation between the pages. For the Pagebook component we have to create our own navigation buttons.
You can use the standard button components, but these have a pretty basic look. In this example I will show you how to create your own custom navigation buttons with some CSS code and a tiny bit of JavaScript.
We will create two buttons. The button for the selected page should have a blue color, the unselected button should be white. Also, when the user hovers the unselected button with the cursor, the button should turn blue.
For this we need three CSS statements. You can add these to your custom CSS file:
- .button_show
- .button_show:hover
- .button_selected
