SAP BO Dashboards cookbook Tweetaway
Okay guys, it is time to give some stuff away. On behalf of Packt Publishing we can give away two eBook copies of the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards cookbook we released a few weeks ago.
Joining this giveaway Tweetaway is easy: Just send out a tweet with a link to the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards’ cookbook page on PacktPub.com in it. You can use the share buttons on the cookbook page itself, or just click this link. Retweeting other tweeps is also allowed and you can tweet as much as you want.
On monday 25th July we will pick the two winners and grant them access to their free eBooks. Good luck!
5 reasons I like Spotify
I recently discovered this online music service called Spotify and after a try-out of a few weeks I just have to let you know how great this concept is. Spotify is a cloud based music service, which means that you don’t have to download a song before you can listen to it anymore. It just streams the music on demand. Spotify is available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands (sorry USA and Canada). Try it!
1. Big music catalogue
Spotify contains over 8 millions musc tracks including artists from the big labels like Universal, EMI, Sony etc. Of course the traditional ‘difficult’ bands don’t show up (Metallica). The Spotify software has an option to import music files, so you can still listen to these non-available bands with Spotify if you get their music from other sources. Also, I found a lot of local bands (Jacqueline, Acda & de Munnik, Lars Winnerbäck).
Twitter, Flash & HTML5
Twitter is great. It keeps me up-to-date on what is happening in the world and nowadays I get my information directly from the source! The added value of those traditional, old-school newspaper/TV journalists is decreasing day by day. This is a good thing. I see most journalists as nothing more than a filter, tweaking their opinions into the real facts. With Twitter the people that I see as important or interesting are the modern journalists. They are my personal groups of journalists. And if they don’t deliver quality, I just unfollow them.
Tonight I read two nice tweets. First I learned that someone wrote an app/hack to use flash on the iPhone/iPad (iOS). If this thing really works this would be great news for dashboard development with Xcelsius SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition. Finally the development of dashboards for the iPhone and iPad could begin. Let’s hope so. Here is the article with the video ‘proof’.
Next I read a tweet about the differences between Adobe Flash and HTML5. Apple favours HTML5 and gives a nice showcase on its website (Safari 5 required). But what exactly is HTML5 and how can Flash and HTML5 be compared? Focus published this cool A4-sized overview.
Thanks for tweeting!
Posted in: Knowledge sharing, New technology, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, Twitter, XcelsiusThoughts 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.
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.
