As a huge college basketball fan, more specifically a die-hard Duke fan, I recently got into a heated debate about what school has the most top draft picks. So of course that sparked an interesting dashboard idea, with the NBA finals and upcoming NBA draft this month.

The result is an Xcelsius dashboard with all of the NBA Draft Lottery picks since 1985. My goal was to enable dynamic analysis of any date range for the top X draft picks. Whether analyzing top 5 draft picks or top 10 picks, I wanted to dynamically see what colleges produced the top number of draft picks.

At the same time, you can click on any team or college within the bar chart to see the individual players who were drafted.

To build this dashboard, I used a combination of a few workarounds and Centigon Solutions plugin components including Filtered Summary, Dynamic Sort, and Background Builder. Without these components, this particular dashboard would have been near impossible.

I am going to provide the source files for this particular dashboard and do a few articles about specific workarounds, so you can learn a few new tricks of the trade while having the opportunity to use add-on components to build this type of analysis.



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Webinar Title:
Xcelsius Gurus Data Connectivity Series: Part 2 - When to utilize non-Business Objects connectivity for your dashboard?

Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 10:00 am (Pacific Standard Time)

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/webcontent/uuid/108575d8-7b15-2c10-9fb2-d0082634b740

Speakers: Mico Yuk (EverythingXcelsius.com); Ryan Goodman (Centigon Solutions)

Following up from Part 1 of their successful Data Connectivity Series, Ryan and Mico, 2 of the top Xcelsius Gurus in the world, reveal how and when organizations should leverage non Business Objects connectivity options such as custom web services and portals to connect their Xcelsius dashboards. Not all data is created equal, and neither are your dashboard data requirements. SOAP, Excel XML Maps, XML Data Button, the Xcelsius SDK? By viewing common scenarios and seeing their suggestions for when and how to use these powerful connections, achieving your strategic dashboard goals will become simple. Understanding these standard integration points will not only shorten your dashboard development time, but it will also allow you to make educated decisions of how to best connect your dashboards to live data.

In this session you will learn how to:

* Choose the correct non SAP Business Objects connectivity option by viewing a number of real world scenarios and using our fact based suggestions
* Correctly utilize custom web services and XML connectivity option to power your Xcelsius dashboards
* Integrate Xcelsius into a web based application or portal

I am excited to announce a new web site today called MobileDataVisualization.com. This new site is geared toward an innovative new technology, RoamBi, and will feature general best practices and emerging trends for mobile business intelligence.

As the chief editor of MobileDataVisualization.com, I will contribute my own experiences and insights as the demand for mobile visualization increases. I look forward to this new project, since I believe that RoamBi will change the landscape for mobile visualization the same way Xcelsius did in 2003.

I invite you to come and checkout and subscribe to the new site to learn more about mobile data visualization and RoamBi.

Just got back from an exciting Google conference where Centigon Solutions was invited to share our GMaps Plugin at the developer sandbox. We had a lot of interesting discussions and came back with great new ideas for improving the map's performance and speed for plotting points.

The best part was Google provided everyone with a brand new Google Android phone which is much better than the standard bag full of sales collateral junk.

When you have selectors in Xcelsius, there is no good way to create an "all" selection. Here is a technique that I use which requires 1 extra column containing an IF() statement and a second transparent selector. Overall the solution is extremely lightweight without a lot of extra work while remaining completely data driven. I have another technique with 2 dimensions, where you can dynamically roll up the data using Filtered Summary, so I will try to post that one next week.

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