Roadmap
SAC Application Design and Lumira Designer – Roadmap questions
I recently got quite some questions about the new Application Design feature in SAP Analytics Cloud, especially its position in relation to SAP Lumira Designer (Design Studio). I understand that all this may raise some questions with SAP BI customers that haven’t hopped on the SAC train yet or are just starting with their orientation on cloud solutions. So let’s bring some clarity here by starting from the beginning.
Application Design is part of the SAP Analytics Cloud platform and gives you the possibility to offer centrally governed analytical applications, created by professional application designers. These applications range from simple dashboards with just a few charts or tables to complex applications with custom layouts and interactivity options created with scripts.
With the option to use custom scripts the applications go a big step further than the SAP Analytics Cloud stories. That’s also why the stories are positioned to be (also) created by business users, while the applications are solely built by application designers. Eventually, the idea is to be able to integrate and combine features coming from the whole SAC platform in applications. For example, an application could visualize a live data source (BI), run a predictive scenario and offer planning capabilities to update data based on this.
Posted in: SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, SAP LumiraSAP Design Studio minor roadmap update 2015.12.04
A minor update on the latest SAP Design Studio roadmap was made available this week: revision 2015.12.04. I compared this new roadmap with the previous version (2015.10.23).
1. As Design Studio 1.6 is now available, a ‘further information’ slide is added (slide #27).
2. The Future Direction slide now also makes a statement on the HANA Connector (#53):
SAP recommends to use the http-based HANA Connector (introduced in version 1.5) going forward. The former HANA connector will not be extended further and hence will not expose newer HANA features to the front-end.
3. They forgot to put in a slide on the Right to Left support in Design Studio 1.6 (#53).
SAP Design Studio Roadmap minor – but interesting – update
To my surprise a new roadmap for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio was published last week: version July 22 2015. This is only two months after the previous update (May 5 2015) and it is still covering the same current 1.5 release. You can find the roadmap here (S-account required).
I went through it and made some comparisons:
Searching for changes with last roadmap (05/04): “Offline enhancements” are out of Planned Innovations… pic.twitter.com/lqqUPJqbA0
— Xavier Hacking (@xjhacking) July 26, 2015
Design Studio focus will be on BI Platform and HANA deployments. New BW depl investments are NOT PLANNED! pic.twitter.com/2TnOYExPyA
— Xavier Hacking (@xjhacking) July 26, 2015
New Design Studio roadmap also gives a nice feature support matrix for all deployment options: pic.twitter.com/6cLviVHzTp
— Xavier Hacking (@xjhacking) July 26, 2015
Posted in: SAP BusinessObjects Design StudioConclusion: SAP BI Platform deployment is the #1 option if you want most/all of the Design Studio features. #SAPDesignStudio
— Xavier Hacking (@xjhacking) July 26, 2015
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):
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.
Posted in: Knowledge sharing
