Thursday, May 11, 2017

SAP Convergence Strategy - Web Intelligence

The April 20, 2017, SAPinsider Q&A focused on the SAP BI Convergence Strategy.

So far, I've published posts on the convergence strategy itself, and on what's new in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 SP4, and the merger of Lumira and Design Studio. Let's turn our attention to SAP Web Intelligence.

During this year's Q&A, Gregory Botticchio told us that the Web Intelligence team had delivered approximately "50 innovations and cumulative enhancements." The top 6 most popular, according to Gregory:
  • Parallel refresh of WebI data providers, for all datasources
  • Commentary: add a comment in a report and in a table cell
  • Shared Element: share and reuse blocks (table, carts) between users
  • New SAP HANA access mode (direct access and OnLine)
  • dHTML catchup vs the Java applet
  • Dynamic, or Cascading, Input Controls

Coming in SP4 are improvements to the Web Intelligence dHTML client, new chart types and cumulative enhancements, but the biggest news in SP4 is a new Web Intelligence interface:

…we will mainly deliver a new, modern and elegant, SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence experience. It will be an interface build in HTML5, using some SAP Fiori UI5 elements. And it will be mostly an interactive viewer that you will have the choice to use in parallel of the existing one.

Gregory also gave us some details on the road ahead for Web Intelligence:

In the mid/long-term: We are planning a new simplified and modernized WebI Designer, to complete the story. Also we are thinking of changing the way to create reports by proposing Suggestions and Recommendations. Interactive Analysis for the end-users will also be key in this future release.

You can find more about the Web Intelligence roadmap in the Q&A transcript, which you can access from the APOS On-Demand Webinars page:



Future posts will look at what's new in Analysis for Office and SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.

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