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Thoughts 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.
Webinar: SAP BW/BO integration best practices
Last night SAP presented a webinar on integration SAP BusinessObjects BI with SAP Netweaver BW. The webinar included best practices on tool selection, report development approach, architectural choices and performance optimization. The upcoming enhancements in the BOE/BW stack were discussed and an overview of successful scenarios was given.
You can now rewatch the webinar here and download the presentation here. In the remainder of this post I dropped the webinar agenda and some interesting slides.
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Being an Apple fan/evangelist for almost all my life I experienced numerous introductions of cool new Apple products. Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997 he delivered most of these product launches in his famous keynote speech (Stevenote) at MacWorld or WWDC. Anyone who has ever watched one of these events will admit that Jobs’ presentation skills are outstanding. Somehow he is able to deliver a performance that will fascinate you from the first until the last minute.
Now move over to the world of SAP and probably 80% (or more) of the presentations we attend. I watched the Vienna SAP TechEd keynote a few weeks ago through the live video stream. The speed of the presentations was very low and the slides were boring and stuffed with text. After a while people in the audience started to write tweets like:
Keynote #sapteched09 about speed of change? In stead of ppt with figures I like to see real SAP stuff, come on.
OK, we get the business case. Can we move on how attendees can use SAP technology 2 implement the business solution?
Ouch. Not good.
Luckily for us (and the guys at SAP) Carmine Gallo, a BusinessWeek columnist, wrote a great book on how to give a presentation like Steve Jobs. The book is overloaded with concrete examples from keynotes from the past. For example how to keep your slides simple and visual and why you should never, ever, use bullet points in your slides (it is actually the least effective way to deliver information). If Jobs starts talking about the Apple 2009 results, the slide simply says “2009”.
Gallo also shows that Jobs uses tons of short Twitter-like headlines that are easy to remember. At the introduction of the iPod, Jobs could have said something like:
Today we are introducing a new, ultraportable MP3 player with 6.5-ounce design and a 5 GB hard drive, complete with Apple’s legendary ease of use.
Instead he said:
iPod. 1000 songs in your pocket.
Feel the difference?
I found this video of Gallo in which he outlines the key topics of the book while showing some examples from actual Steve Jobs keynotes. You can find more info at Gallo’s BusinessWeek blog, at The Cult of Mac or at Amazon.
SAP Constellation/12Sprints and Kona
Wow, seems like SAP is going to launch some very cool stuff in 2010: Constellation/12Sprints and Koda (all codenames). What can we tell about these two tools? Well, not very much yet. There are some articles on the internet and a short demonstration video which gives us some clues. You can watch the video below.
Constellation seems to be some sort of collaborative workspace, that allows its users to share data, discuss it and make decisions together. To me this idea looks a bit like Google Wave, but now tailored to the decision making processes within enterprises.
This is what SAP says about Constellation:
Imagine a virtual war room
It’s not just a place where things get discussed. It’s where things get done. Invite the right people. Bring in the pertinent data. And choose the most informed course of action with the help of pre-defined, interactive decision-making tools. It’s all built in. Everything you need to get everyone on the same page — finally under one roof.
At 12Sprints.com you can sign-up to get access to the beta.
Kona is a web-based business intelligence platform/tool, which gives you access to dashboards and reports with drill-down functionality. Also the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer will be a part of Kona. Data and graphs from Kona can be exported to Constellation.
This leaves me with a some questions:
– Why introduce two separate platforms and not one integrated platform?
– How open will these platforms be? Can we make our own Robots/Gadgets?
– What about Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius and Pioneer? Will they also be integrated in Kona?
– And hey, what about the BusinessObjects InfoView portal environment? Will it be ditched?
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.
