Solution Spotlight - APOS Publisher

APOS Publisher is a complete publishing solution for SAP BusinessObjects. It provides:

• An advanced bursting engine
• Automated document production
• Enhanced distribution, encryption & integration
• Integration with BI Launchpad (BI 4.2, SP4)
• Workflow monitoring, alerts and auditing\
• Interactive process control
• Assured delivery, auto recovery, & partial burst reruns

Learn More About APOS Publisher…

Download the whitepaper:
APOS Publisher: Progressive Enterprise Publishing Solutions for SAP BusinessObjects

Advanced Information Distribution Governance

With the frequency of high-profile data breaches over the past few years, risk is on everyone's mind. If there is value in information, there is necessarily also risk, which is why APOS Publisher is designed to deliver tightly controlled document production, publishing, and distribution.

Data governance requires you to establish control over the flow and exposure of information. Information distribution governance is how you establish and maintain that control.

The Distribution Server module of APOS Publisher Server is a post-processing engine that delivers a great variety of options that simplify and clarify user processes for greater empowerment and convenience, enhance information security through numerous encryption and password-protection methods, and fortify governance requirements by enforcing formats and destinations.

Push, pull, print, or place -- these are the essential information distribution options. Distribution Server delivers on all of these options, but it is with the "place" option that Distribution Server really shines.

When we place information, we are putting it where it is needed, when it is needed, with the right security, in order to inform workflows and decisions. Distribution Server's great variety of destination types, format types and security options make it possible to put information where it will be most timely and useful.

With the release of SAP BI 4.2 SP4, APOS Publisher's Distribution Server module is integrated with BI Launchpad, so SAP BI customers who also have a Distribution Server license can now access its advanced distribution, encryption and integration capabilities directly within the BI Launchpad interface.

Download the whitepaper:
Advanced Information Distribution Governance: APOS Publisher / BI Launchpad Integration

APOS Publisher Case Studies

Read case studies on how individual companies have used APOS Publisher for superior document production, delivery and distribution, and to achieve their information distribution governance needs:

• Harvey Norman - Multinational Retail
• Redevco B.V. - Real Estate
• The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids, Toronto) - Healthcare
• Outsourcing Solutions Inc. - Business Services
• CrescentStonco, Genlyte Group - Energy

Webinar: SAP's Alexander Peter on Analysis for Office

What: What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office Webinar
When: Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2016 – 11:00 am EDT
Guest Presenter: Alexander Peter, Product Manager, SAP

SAP’s Alexander Peter joins us to discuss what’s new and what’s ahead for SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office (Analysis for Office).

If you were able to attend our SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office - Scheduling, Distributing, Managing webinar back in June, you may remember that we promised to host a session to focus on what features are coming in the near future, and what the long term plans for Analysis for Office are. This is that session, and Alexander will be here to answer your questions on all aspects of the current version of Analysis for Office, as well as on the roadmap.

SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office is the BI information analysis and delivery tool of choice for many users, both because of its capabilities and its ease of use. If your organization is looking for ways to increase both of these features of Analysis for Office, then you should definitely attend this webinar.

Many of APOS' well managed BI solutions can help you perform many Analysis for Office asks more efficiently and effectively.

• Scheduling - APOS Administrator and APOS Publisher can help you to schedule reports for personal, team and recurring reports, for large and diverse groups (including external stakeholders) to a variety of format and destination types.
• Management and Administration - APOS Administrator, APOS Storage Center and APOS Insight can help you with bulk instance management, document archive/backup/selective restore, and impact analysis.
• Using Analysis for Office as a Data Source - The APOS Data Gateway solution lets you use Analysis for Office documents as a data source for your other BI projects in, for example, SAP Design Studio or SAP Lumira. The reason this a desirable capability is that it allows you to leverage the discovery and analytical work done in Analysis for Office, and to avoid repeating the same work in other analytical and visualization applications.

You can find out more about how APOS well managed BI solutions can help get the most out of Analysis for office here, and please join Alexander and our APOS team as we explore continuous improvement of the SAP Analysis for Office offering in this informative webinar.

Register for this webinar…

New Case Study - Redevco B.V.

Established in 1999 to manage the real estate investment activities of the venerable Dutch C&A fashion retail chain, Redevco B.V.'s portfolio includes 450 properties at top locations in major cities across Europe, with tenants including many major national and multinational retail companies.
Redevco implemented the APOS Publisher solution to handle invoice publishing after they started creating the invoices in Web Intelligence instead of Desktop Intelligence.

Check out the new APOS case study on Redevco to find out how they re-engineered their invoicing workflow with APOS Publisher.

Product Update: APOS Publisher and Xcelsius Bursting

APOS Publisher now includes the ability to burst Xcelsius in the form of a static image (PNG). This new feature lets you export from Xcelsius to a PNG file, and embed the image within PDFs and Excel files, which you can then distribute to multiple destinations, or to print.

This new functionality is in addition to the existing ability to export Xcelsius to SWF files.

SAP BusinessObjects Migration with APOS Publisher

Your organization probably has many reasons for moving to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0. SAP cites data access as one of the key reasons enterprises should upgrade. Better integration with SAP BW, the new dimensional semantic layer, and multi-source universes enhance that access, but enhanced access is only half of the story. If you have more, or more detailed, information at your disposal, then you will also likely have increased or more complex delivery requirements.
What will you do to enhance delivery of information to the all-important information consumers in your organization?

APOS Publisher is a complete publishing solution for SAP BusinessObjects, allowing you to maintain consistent document bursting, consolidation and delivery processes across multiple versions of SAP BusinessObjects.

With APOS Publisher, you can:

• Use business rules to generate a large number of individually scheduled reports automatically.
• Burst large report instances into smaller instances based on business rules, convert to a common format and distribute.
• Emulate Desktop Intelligence's use of scripts to extract data from various data sources.

APOS Publisher is an essential solution for organizations that have complex SAP BusinessObjects distribution requirements with multiple report format and destination types. For such organizations, APOS Publisher is a complete SAP BusinessObjects publishing solution, including robust bursting management, post-processing distribution service, report package management, and assured delivery to extend those available in SAP BusinessObjects. Publisher automates these tasks while providing personalized reporting to your information consumers.

SAP BusinessObjects platform managers and technicians value the flexibility and agility that Publisher's custom properties, flags and settings add to their scheduling, bursting and distribution efforts, and the ability to zip and encrypt reports.

Webinar: Progressive Enterprise Publishing Solutions for SAPBusinessObjects

Are your current publishing processes growing more complex and consuming more and more of your administrative resources? Are they based on costly and outdated legacy software and platforms? This webinar will show you how to plan, automate, execute, and monitor document and statement generation from within a modern BI-integrated enterprise publishing solution.

The APOS Publisher Solution provides the agility, flexibility and security to meet complex BI publishing requirements. APOS Publisher complements the inherent strengths of SAP BusinessObjects, and brings end-to-end monitoring, control and output management to your process.

Join us on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at 10 am or 4pm EDT for this thought-provoking discussion.

Product Pipeline: APOS Publisher

Announcement from the APOS Development team on new APOS Publisher feature:

• Distribution Server now supports SSH FTP.

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Webinar: a Complete BI Publishing Solution

Webinar: Execute tightly controlled document production, publishing and distribution workflows with APOS Publisher.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 10 a.m. / 4 p.m. EDT.

If your SAP BusinessObjects deployment is well managed, it presents a single, consistent view of your corporate data, regardless of the number of datasources it joins. If this is the case, then your BI platform should also be your primary publishing platform for enterprise information.

But using your BI platform in this way may require you to overcome some major challenges, including:

• The growing volume, variety and complexity of enterprise document publishing
• Migration of legacy system functions to the BI system
• The need to monitor mission-critical processes closely, and manage proactively
• The need for flexibility and agility to address new line-of-business requirements

APOS Publisher is an essential solution for organizations that have complex SAP BusinessObjects distribution requirements with multiple report format and destination types.

For such organizations, APOS Publisher is a complete SAP BusinessObjects publishing solution, including robust bursting management, post-processing distribution service, report package management, and assured delivery to extend SAP BusinessObjects' capabilities.

APOS Publisher achieves advanced SAP BusinessObjects publishing through:

• An advanced bursting engine
• Automated document production
• Workflow monitoring, alerts and auditing
• Interactive process control
• Assured delivery, auto recovery, & partial burst reruns
• Enhanced distribution, encryption & integration

Learn how APOS can help you execute tightly controlled document production, publishing and distribution workflows for your enterprise. Register for this webinar.

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BI Publishing and the CFO

Linda Tucci of SearchCIO-Midmarket tells the story of a CFO taking the lead on business intelligence strategy. What drove the CFO to get involved? Was it quality of information? Was it the price of the solution? Total cost of ownership?

No. It was the fact that the company was going through reams of paper on a daily basis. Their staff were manually sorting, collating, troubleshooting and distributing reports. CFO Gary Petrangelo:

"The larger the size of the department, the bigger the report. Our mailing department could have 200 pages to page through if a discrepancy showed up in the bottom line," Petrangelo said... "To me it just seemed senseless, with all the technology we have. We should be able to generate that in electronic format," Petrangelo said.

What drove the CFO to get involved was the company's outdated and unwieldy process of generating, distributing and accessing business intelligence -- in a word: Publishing. The publishing capabilities of their legacy BI system were not scalable and extensible enough to meet their growing needs.

This anecdotal evidence agrees with our experience selling the APOS Publisher solution: the growing demands on the BI system, the complexities of those demands, and the migration of line-of-business functions to the BI platform call for an end-to-end, integrated, scalable and extensible BI publishing solution.

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Webinar Reminder: Publishing for SAP BusinessObjects

Thousands of organizations rely on the SAP BusinessObjects platform to connect their information consumers with the business intelligence content they need for effective decision-making. The business intelligence publishing process is of critical importance to these organizations. They require flawless generation and timely delivery of reports, and secure access for information consumers.

Is your publishing process growing more and more complex and consuming more and more of your administrative resources? Find out how report generation, distribution, and access can be planned, automated, executed and monitored from within a single integrated solution.

The APOS Publisher Solution provides the agility, flexibility and security to meet complex BI publishing requirements. APOS Publisher complements the inherent strengths of SAP BusinessObjects, and brings end-to-end monitoring and control to your output management process.

Please join us for this 45-minute webinar to learn more about:

• Complementing SAP Publishing with APOS Publisher
• Understanding the content lifecycle
• Automating bursting and scheduling
• Proactively managinge the full publishing process
• Getting more from your BI system - total output management

Have you missed an important webinar? Download recent webinars and white papers here.
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Beyond Bursting: the Future of BI Publishing

Publishing has some very specific connotations in the business intelligence world. To some, BI publishing is just report printing, but this description does not do justice to the many subtleties and complexities of BI publishing. As BI becomes more pervasive within organizations, the needs of information consumers increase and grow more complex, and so do the information delivery requirements.

BI publishing is more than just bursting now. It has become a much larger topic within today's enterprise. An end-to-end BI publishing solution should not only meet today's information requirements, but also lay the groundwork for the future of enterprise information generation, delivery, and secure access.

Let's look at BI publishing at the conceptual level. The objective of an end-to-end BI publishing solution is to get the right content to the right information consumer, at the right time, in the right format, and with the right level of security. The solution has to generate the content, distribute it, and provide (secure) access to it. And to ensure that all of these things happen according to plan, the solution must have an administrative layer that assures delivery and provides remedial capabilities.

A BI publishing solution that does all of these things well should be of interest to a variety of people within an enterprise:

• BI administrators need to know that tasks have executed as scheduled, and they need to be able to validate reception of documents by information consumers. But knowing is not enough: they also need clear remedial courses of action to administer publishing processes proactively.
• BI Platform managers need a BI publishing solution that is both scalable and extensible. Scalable, because they know that publishing needs will continue to grow as the demand for BI becomes more pervasive throughout the organization. Extensible, because line-of-business managers will continue to ask them for more enterprise publishing functionality. Knowing they have a robust BI publishing system gives platform managers the confidence they need to offer new enterprise publishing solutions.
• Line-of-business managers need to optimize the flow of information within their business units and look for new ways to create competitive advantage. An end-to-end BI publishing solution goes beyond the generation and delivery of internal documents. As the use of BI publishing becomes more customer-facing, it becomes a key line-of-business tool, and the more line-of-business managers get from a BI publishing solution, the more they will demand.
• CIOs and other C-level executives are looking for cost-effective ways to modernize legacy information systems. Many internal and customer-facing document generation and delivery applications reside on aging IT infrastructure. C-level executives are looking to leverage their BI investment to assume many of these legacy functions.

Have you missed an important webinar? Download recent webinars here.

APOS Publisher: A Complete Publishing Solution for SAP BusinessObjects

The publishing process in SAP BusinessObjects is critical to effective and pervasive business intelligence. You may have high-quality information within your BI system, but it's all for nothing if that information doesn't reach the decision makers in your organization in a timely and secure manner.

Publishing may be invisible to your information consumers, but if you are a platform manager or technician, it is critical that you understand and manage the publishing process to deliver high-quality, timely reports.

What's involved in the generation, distribution and accessibility of your SAP BusinessObjects reports? And how does the APOS Publisher Solution make it easier for you to configure and manage the publishing process?

The APOS Publisher Solution is a complete publishing solution for SAP BusinessObjects, the business intelligence solution that thousands of organizations around the world rely on to connect their information consumers with the analytics they need for effective decision making.

What makes APOS Publisher the best choice for publishing SAP BusinessObjects reports? Publisher not only automates a large part of your publishing process, but also provides the flexibility to manage the process of generating tailored documents and delivering them to stakeholders throughout the enterprise, and beyond.

Bursting & Consolidation: Generating the Right Content for the Right People

The APOS Publisher Bursting module enables a seamless, secure, automated and data-driven publishing process. "Multi-pass" bursting lets you run large numbers of schedules that have been personalized in APOS Publisher.

Alternatively, you can gain even more flexibility by using Publisher's "single-pass" bursting, which creates a single large instance for post-processing by the APOS Distribution Server module. In both scenarios, bursting is an automated process.

If you are distributing multiple documents to the same recipients, use APOS Publisher to consolidate the reports into a single report package for ease of consumption and simplified monitoring and management.

APOS Publisher Bursting achieves a high degree of automation through bursting definitions that are tied directly to your SAP BusinessObjects system. The bursting process adjusts automatically to user changes in your BI system.

Distribution: The Who, When & How of Delivery

Every organization's report delivery needs are unique and frequently complex. Format, security, delivery location -- all of these factors are key to satisfying the needs of business process workflows, and the needs of all business units and the information consumers within them.

The APOS Publisher Solution's Distribution module provides additional post-processing, such as adding encryption and other special export options and destinations. Publisher uses regular SAP BusinessObjects scheduling functionality, but adds extra settings and custom properties to achieve more distribution flexibility. With Publisher, you can distribute your reports to multiple destinations simultaneously, including:

• Printer (multiple simultaneously)
• Network file location
• Email as attachment
• Email as content
• FTP
• SFTP

Publisher's Distribution functionality is also the gateway to integration with your content management system.

APOS Publisher & Content Fusion: Accessibility

Is it time for your organization's information systems to work together? Do you have both a business intelligence system to gather and analyze mission-critical data, and a content management system to help with collaborative processes? Optimizing the flow of information means fusing these systems together.

APOS Publisher provides all of the automation, security, and accessibility you need to publish your SAP BusinessObjects reports successfully. However, as the need for business intelligence within your organization becomes more pervasive, you may want to consider even wider accessibility.

The Content Fusion module is a natural extension to APOS Publisher. Content Fusion uses plug-ins to perform "active archiving" within content management systems such as Open Text (9.7.1 or 10) and Microsoft SharePoint (2003, 2007, 2010). You can attach your SAP BusinessObjects reports to your content management workflows to create complete intelligence packages. Attached reports include metadata such as source, parameters, ownership, and other lineage information.

The Big Picture

The APOS Publisher Solution covers the SAP BusinessObjects content lifecycle from start to finish, and it integrates seamlessly with the entire suite of APOS solutions, all designed to help you get the most out of your SAP BusinessObjects deployment.

Product Pipeline: APOS Publisher 2011-04

Announcing improvements to APOS Publisher, our end-to-end publishing and content management integration solution for SAP BusinessObjects:

• New plug-ins to link SAP BusinessObjects to Open Text and Microsoft SharePoint
• Improved integration with the APOS Administration Instance Manager module

Read more…

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