Yesterday ASUG had a webcast where SAP's Alex Peter and ASUG volunteer Joyce Butler reported the results of the ASUG Analysis Influence Council.
Alex said the ASUG Analysis Influence Council was very helpful. Please note that anything for the future is subject to change and the usual legal disclaimer applies.
The current council has 12 companies covering different companies and industries.
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Figure 1: Source: ASUG Analysis Influence Council
Figure 1 shows the purpose of ASUG Influence Councils.
This webcast covered where ASUG members influenced SAP:and future roadmap.
BW Workspace
BW Workspaces, which is the technical name for mashing up local data with BW data. You can add your own classification of items that are not already in the BW model.
BEx Workbooks
Another area where the ASUG Influence Council influenced SAP was conversion of BEx Workbooks. At first SAP only focused on BEx 7.0 workbook conversion but the influence council clearly indicated that BEx 3.5 workbooks are needed. Adding additional pressure was BEx 3.5 recently went out of maintenance; hence the need of offering a BEx 3.5 workbook conversion to Analysis Office
Variants
Variants was a gap with BEx Analyzer and the council asked for variants to be done as soon as possible.
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Figure 2: Source: SAP
Figure 2 shows a new prompt dialog for Analysis OLAP, you can save the prompt values and create public and private variants. You can also merge and unmerge variables.
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Figure 3: Source: SAP
Figure 3 feature is only available for MSAS allowing for custom groupings, resulting from a discussion from this ASUG Influence Council.
This is not for BW yet.
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Figure 4: Source: SAP
Create Analysis application from Analysis OLAP client you can take over the current datasources and directly post in Design Studio application.
Then you can change with Design Studio and change the interactivity features to filter items.
BEx Query Designer
If you are on a datasource and access Query Designer and redeploy to workbook was highly prioritized by the Influence Council
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Figure 5: Source: SAP
Figure 5 shows that scheduling Analysis Office is available on the BI Platform. SAP decided to do it on the BI Platform as it offers more than the BEx Broadcaster
There are a few things to catch up such as query prompt support; if a query has a prompt that is not supported. You can filter by exit or authorization variables.
Figure 5 covers the requirements.
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Figure 6: Source: SAP
Figure 6 shows the left column today
The next release will be called “2.0” and will be a big effort
Beta will be Q2 and RTC will be end of year.
The big effort is rebuilding the platform of add-in because SAP plans to let SAP run add-ins side by side such as EPM. Today the add-ins do not work side-by side
SAP wants to have them run side by side and clear vision for one single BI related add-in at SAP.
Analysis Office/EPM are planned to be brought together and SAP wants a smooth transition.
Configuration of workbooks is when you have several plug-ins available you would like to have a custom ribbons/context menu and combine in one single ribbon
Table formatting means you can only handle table as big block; can’t add empty lines or rows in a specific format. The idea is to add some specific style elements in the table that continues to exist after refresh or navigation. This also includes Excel-based formulas and expect it to “survive” any navigation. Analysis Office has to translate it into semantics to get this to work.
Complex scenarios include conditional formatting. Hichert has some rules (planned values in light grey and actual in black and use color for positive trends) for cross tabs and charts and this could be used.
First release will start with simple inserting formatting of rows.
For BW, SAP is extending the unified BPC planning which is the evolution of BW-IP
On the BW side they are introducing the multi-select if you would like to change some specific settings, you can do that only one by one today.
In 2.0 (planned innovations) they will introduce storing workbooks in HANA.
Future directions include comments stored and work on PowerPoint .and scheduling.
Lumira integration: the idea is to have visualizations from Lumira in Excel or PowerPoint and integrate vice-versa. Native HANA means Analysis Office talks directly to HANA platform instead of today’s ODBC connection.
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Figure 7: Source: SAP
In the future includes improved currency conversion support.
Planned innovations includes source related.
It has good interoperability with Design Studio and Analysis OLAP will stay as a good Analysis adhoc OLAP client.
Related:
Analysis Office will have sessions at BI 2014
Jump Start ASUG Annual Conference SAPPHIRE with a Pre-Conference Session - Back and Better than Ever includes hands-on Analysis Office with BW on HANA
