SAP
New GMaps Plugin v2 for Xcelsius try-out
This summer Centigon Solutions released the latest version of their Google Maps add-on for Xcelsius (uh, SAP Crystal Solutions Presentation Design…). Although I liked the first version of this add-on, I really missed an option for showing regional alerts. You still had to use the standard Xcelsius map-components which did support this feature.
In this post I will show the steps you have to take to create a dashboard showing a Google Map with regions that have alert colors and are clickable with some drill-down functionality like the example below.
Update: First check this post concerning changes on the Google Maps API.
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Posted in: Knowledge sharing, New technology, SAP, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, XcelsiusPrototype: SAP BO Exploration Dashboards
I found this video by the SAP Innovation Center, showing us a prototype of some cool new tooling for quick and easy dashboard creation. It looks a bit like the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. Enjoy!
Posted in: New technology, SAP, SAP BusinessObjectsBye bye Xcelsius, Hello SAP Crystal Solutions?
Last week SAP introduced a new product name for its reporting and dashboarding tooling portfolio: SAP Crystal Solutions. Unfortunately the Xcelsius brand name will completely disappear. Xcelsius Present will be SAP Crystal Presentation Design and Xcelsius Engage should be called SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition from now on.
Uh right. Why didn’t they just name it SAP Crystal Xcelsius?
In the table below an overview of the old and new names is shown:
Old Name |
New Name |
| Crystal Reports | SAP Crystal Reports |
| Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 | SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 |
| Crystal Reports for Eclipse | SAP Crystal Reports for Eclipse |
| Crystal Reports Viewer | SAP Crystal Reports viewer |
| Crystal Reports Server | SAP Crystal Reports Server |
| Crystal Reports Visual Advantage | SAP Crystal Reports Dashboard Design package |
| Crystal Reports Developer Advantage | SAP Crystal Reports runtime server license |
| Xcelsius Present | SAP Crystal Presentation Design |
| Xcelsius Engage | SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, personal edition |
Get more information from this blog.
Posted in: SAP, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, XcelsiusXcelsius: Using the Push Button for data input
Xcelsius is a great tool to build interactive what-if scenarios based on MS Excel models. We recently got a request to build such a dashboard and one of the user interface requirements was that the user should be able to change a value by clicking something like a +/- button. Clicking the plus had to increase the value with 1, and clicking the min had to decrease it with 1.
Luckily, Xcelsius provides us the Spinner component. This would have been a good and easy solution, if another 
requirement wouldn’t have been that the dashboard had to be used on a (multi)touch screen. Touch means big buttons for user input and as you can see on the right, the Spinner component is way too detailed. So we needed something else to do the job.
To solve this we used the new Push Button components. The Push Button simply does what its name says and pushes a value from a source cell to a destination cell. To solve our little problem we used two of these Push Buttons and some basic MS Excel logic.
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Posted in: DIY, Knowledge sharing, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, XcelsiusSAP StreamWork (12Sprints) videos
SAP recently published a bunch of videos (promo’s, introductions, tutorials) on its collaboration platform SAP StreamWork, formerly known as 12Sprints. You can find them in the SAP Streamwork YouTube channel.
Below I put the cool promo video and a proof-of-concept video of SAP Streamwork integration with a SAP BPM purchase order process.
Posted in: Featured, New technology, SAP
