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De Nederlandse BI Podcast – Episode 8 VNSG Edition
Episode 8, previewing the Dutch VNSG congres next month.
Check the show in iTunes, on our website or just use the Podcast player below.
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):
#MyFirstMac & MacGaming in the ’80’s!
The Macintosh turned 30 last week and in celebration of this event people were sharing their first Mac stories on Twitter (#MyFirstMac). My parents bought our first Mac somewhere in 1988 I guess. It was a very happy Macintosh SE and I actually still have him sitting on my desk!
The main purpose of the Mac (and the StyleWriter II printer) was for my mom to do the bookkeeping for our local store. But, I mostly remember the fun we had playing with applications as MacPaint, MacDraw, MacWrite, Hypercard and of course the games. There was a Mac community club in the Benelux called Mactivity, and they’d mail a bunch of disks every two months with new utilities, fonts, sounds, icons, programs, games and so. For years this was the only way we got new stuff to run on the Mac!
Going down the memory lane, I went on YouTube and Wikipedia today to check some of the epic games we played for hours and hours on that small black and white screen. Below I posted a selection of them.
LodeRunner
MacGolf Classic
ShufflePuck Café
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
