My Xcelsius Enhancement Wish List

Posted on November 30, 2011 by

I have long waited for some basic Xcelsius enhancements to produce more useful dashboard applications. Understanding that Xcelsius enhancements to existing components is limited, I wanted to pick out a few that I believe are low hanging fruit to make a large volume of developers a little happier.

Will these enhancements help SAP sell more software? absolutely not..

Will it help new customers who are left to execute after they purchase? YES!

These are very minor tweaks that would alter how people build Xcelsius dashboards for the better. I chose these as my top 3 because they are super simple, and do not make sense as third party solutions.

  1. Enable the “selected item” property for all table components (spreadsheet, scorecard, and table view). If I could get one pick, scorecard would be at the top of the list. If I have to tell one more customer that you can’t dynamically chose an item from a table… I may start pulling my hair out!  I would say that 60% of the dashboards I have built could benefit from this.
  2. Bullet charts labels- Bullet charts are great for demos but useless in production. “Performance Value” “Comparative” and “Scale Value” are tooltips that you are stuck with, and the reality is that few if any customers find these usable. The solution? Let me change it in the property sheet.
  3. Provide a “Selected Tab” property so we can start making use of the tabbed container. This is a great component, but most dashboard developers need to know what tab a user is interfacing with.

Some other areas that could use some TLC, but could require some more work for the Xcelsius dev team..

  • Bindable “Selected Item” property is needed within charts.
  • Multi-Selection feature for List View, Combo box, Table components
  • Advanced tool tips for all charts- All of the charts lack an ability
  • Direct Binding for Alerts for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards for BI4- We can auto-bind values and selectors, but not in alerts.

What do you guys think?

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Posted in Xcelsius | 6 Comments

Adobe Abandons Flash for Mobile… What does it mean?

Posted on November 10, 2011 by

“Flash is the NOT the future of the web”. I agree with this statement because today’s “web experience” is designed with iPad in mind. However, Flash/Flex is by no means dead with today’s announcement that Adobe will no longer develop the mobile Flash player.

So while we know that Flash is not the future of the web, I believe that for specialized applications, dashboard visualization, and web animation, Flash has a significantly longer shelf life. We are in an awkward transition period right now because HTML5 does not translate well to sophisticated dashboards and data visualization / discovery… It is just not that simple.

Is HTML5 ready for prime time yet? 

Technologies like Javascript, SVG, and HTML5 combined create a powerful alternative to Flash for creating rich web user experiences.  However, when it comes to enterprise applications, HTML5 presents a problem in the short term. “Develop once deploy everywhere” right now is nearly impossible with so much fragmentation, specifically if you are wanting to use HTML5.

To prove this point, 70% of you reading this article are NOT using a browser that supports HTML5.. That is a stat that I pulled directly from my Google Analytics page. The adoption and growth of HTML5 will be highly dependent how fast consumers are forced to update/upgrade their desktop browsers, which is a rigid process in the enterprise. For example, 32% of you reading this article are using IE 7 and IE8 which are limited in their support of HTML5 features.

What about Xcelsius?

For Xcelsius, today’s Adobe announcement changes nothing unless you buy into the media storm that declares Apple a winner and Adobe a loser. I have yet to see anything in the marketplace that produces the user experience, design flexibility, and power of Xcelsius specifically designed for SAP BusinessObjects. If mobile is an absolute requirement for your organization, I would not wait around for “Mobile Xcelsius”, but instead evaluate some of the new mobile technologies from SAP and partners.

Today, Xcelsius (SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards) and SAP Explorer are both browser-based, Flash tools. They were never built with mobile in-mind, which is why SAP re-built the Explorer experience as a native iOS app. This process is not as simple for Xcelsius because the user experience for every dashboard application is completely different. Even if I could wave a magic wand and make Xcelsius work on an iPad, it would require some fundamental changes to allow for mobile security, a user experience overhaul for gestures, and somehow re-authoring the Excel engine in another technology.

I have absolutely not counted out Xcelsius, as new partners, community members, and experts continue to join and push the ecosystem forward. As long as I know there is forward development at SAP on this technology, I am still optimistic of its future.

Are there alternatives?

I think Antivia is onto something with their Flexwis which takes advantage of  the Flex platform to deploy to Flash on the desktop, and to native iPad / Android apps. Adobe has made incredible strides with their Flex development platform for mobile which looks very promising for this Flexwis platform. For pure mobile reporting/dashboards out the box, Roambi is at the absolute top of my list without any exception. Finally, SAP does have a few brand new mobile reporting/dashboard solutions that I haven’t had time to put through their paces, but look very promising if they deliver as advertised. I will be reporting on them very soon with some good feedback to the community.

What are your thoughts?

I would love to hear your opinions, concerns and questions about today’s announcements, my experiences with building HTML5 apps vs Flash, etc.

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Posted in Mobile visualization, Xcelsius | 5 Comments

Shared Discussion about Xcelsius and Mobility

Posted on November 9, 2011 by

A few days ago I was chatting with a small group on Facebook about Xcelsius, WebI, and mobility and wanted to share my comments with my readership to take this to a larger audience:

” BI vendors are rated on their ability to deliver dashboards, reports, interactive visualization/discovery, ad-hoc, and other information delivery and analysis capabilities under a unified platform. All of the industry analysts break them out into distinct features for a BI stack. SAP has taken a stance in delivering the “right tool for the job” rather than one tool that fills many jobs, so that is what we have come to expect. I do agree that it is a mistake that SAP has not moved faster to mature their visualization and user interaction capabilities across reporting and dashboard tools. WebI could benefit from some enhanced visualization and user experience controls to make them more dashboard-like, and Xcelsius could benefit for a more robust data modeling, adhoc, and drill down controller. Today, SAP has two fronts they have to go after for mobile…

1. Those who have made large investments in WebI / Xcelsius / Explorer and want them to work on the iPad and iPhone…

2. Then you have customers who want the next generation of technology that will enhance mobile access to business intelligence.

Which brings us back to the original post… SAP will show shiny cool technology that we can plan for the future because that is what customers, analysts, shareholders, etc have come to expect at a conference like Sapphire.

Only customers who are well vested in Xcelsius would be excited about an announcement of mobile capabilities for an existing tool. Personally, I think that SAP should be able to deliver both to market at the same time. What do you guys think?”

Then later in the thread, I responded to a statement about Webi maturing over the last 5 years and Xcelsius not moving forward far from where it started as a BusinessObjects acquired technology.

“… you guys are spot on for what has happened (or not happened) the last 5-7 years… At this point, it would be significantly easier to make Webi a mobile designer than Xcelsius primarily because it does not rely on Flash. I think the problem is many customers and SAP use Xcelsius as an army swiss knife when Webi / CR does not provide the user experience requested by customers, and that army swiss knife is built on a platform that will not work on iPad. To compound that, I think that everyone on thread has frustration that nothing seems to be getting done to make it better for us out in the field trying to guide customers what to do..”

As a side note, when I say that Xcelsius will not work on an iPad, I mean that the output SWF will not run out of the box on an iPad. And as of today, Adobe announced that they will no longer work on mobile Flash Player.

Our friends at Antivia were showcasing their iPad solution at ASUG last month and our friends at LaunchWorks actually announced their mobility solution yesterday so there is an approach to make Xcelsius work on iPad but out of the box rendering of SWFs on mobile will be out of the question.

I would love to hear your feedback and comments and those of you who are in Madrid at Sapphire I am sorry I couldn’t be there!

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Posted in Other | 1 Comment

What Kind of Documentation do you Use?

Posted on November 3, 2011 by

I am curious if people actually read the pretty PDF documents that comes with software if there is an online alternative. My goal is to abandon the PDF but wanted to get feedback from the community before I do so.

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Translation Enabled on my Interactive Data Visualization Blog.. Thanks Google

Posted on November 3, 2011 by

Today, I was on a localization roll enabling Google translator for Centigon Solutions News, Centigon Solutions Blog, and now my personal blog. My goal for the blog is to expand my readership beyond English-only. There is still some work to be done where I will need to tag CODE snippets but one of the great things about Google translate is you can hover over text to see the original English text.

If you use the translator, let me know what you think.

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