Classic FTW!
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
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)
The End of Work
So, where did all the jobs go? And where are future jobs coming from? I recently read the 2011 book Race Against The Machine by Brynjolfsson and McAfee and these guys have an interesting view on these questions.
To answer the where did all the jobs go question the authors take another direction than the standard “the economy is not growing fast enough” or “the economy is stagnating and productivity has stopped rising” reactions. They came up with the End of Work argument, which I don’t think I have heard somewhere before as the reason for the current – and constant – high unemployment.
This End of Work idea states that we don’t have too little technological progress, but instead too much! Fewer people are needed to produce the goods and services we require, and all of this is caused by computer automation. But, not only automation of the “dump & easy” repetitive tasks, also more advanced work is evaporating. Think of translating a conversation in real-time or driving a car. 15 years ago this was almost science fiction but today Google is pretty far with these technologies. And once these jobs are gone they just won’t come back anymore.
The big question is who will be effected most by this End of Work. This is actually the interesting part. If we divide the labour market in low, middle and highly skilled workers, surprisingly the workers in the middle category will be effected most, and not the low skilled workers. Why? In an era of more and faster automation it probably is easier to automate the work of a bookkeeper, translator, call-center agent or taxi-driver, than the work of a gardener or hairdresser. For the latter types of jobs you would need very sophisticated and expensive robots, while a translator will be easily substituted by a free Google Translate service. Imagine the impact this will have on our society.
Here in Holland the babyboomers are leaving the workforce since a few years. This would mean more room for younger people on the job market. But I still don’t see any positive effect on the unemployment rate. Two years ago I even did a SAP BI project myself to fully automate the work of two office employees that were about to retire. And they indeed weren’t replaced by new hirees anymore…
Obviously the jobs that require a lot of teamwork and creativity will stay in high demand. I was happy to see that they specifically named jobs in data visualization and analytics as highly valued, so we are probably safe for now. On the other hand, if you are in a traditional type of job where someones tells you exactly what you have to do every day, you will get in real trouble sooner or later…
Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee – ISBN: 978-0984725113
