Case Study: Social Services Agency, Santa Clara County

The Social Services Agency (SSA) of Santa Clara County, CA, spoke to us recently about their experience with our APOS Storage Center and APOS Insight solutions.

The SSA's 600-plus BI accounts currently use Desktop Intelligence and Web Intelligence as their primary report delivery media. At the time of writing, the SSA was in the process of planning its migration to BI 4, so investigation of and preparation for the inevitable full adoption of Web Intelligence was also under way. More recently, the BI team has been delivering BI to the agency's information consumers via SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius).

In 2011, after receiving recommendations from peers at an SAP BusinessObjects conference, SSA implemented APOS Storage Center. SSA needed a strategy and solution for backing up, archiving, and selectively restoring reports. Aside from needing to implement a reliable backup solution, they wanted to optimize system performance and have the means to comply quickly and easily with regulatory requirements through selective restore.

In 2013, as SSA was preparing for their migration to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4, they were looking for a means of doing an inventory and forming a complete understanding of their BI system and what is currently being used. Their positive experience with APOS led them to contact APOS again.

Thinh Hong, Information Systems Manager with SSA, summed up her experiences with these APOS solutions:

APOS Storage Center provides us with an efficient, rules-based means of cleaning up our BI environment, and the ease with which it allows us to back up and selectively restore objects has been very useful. We can archive and retrieve historical instances in a neutral format, which is important, because we maintain a five-year window on instances for regulatory compliance.

…

APOS Insight's impact analysis capabilities allow us to see what effect changes to our data model will have downstream. It has allowed us to analyze SAP BusinessObjects metadata effectively. The information we've gathered through Insight has been very useful in helping us to manage and troubleshoot our BI environment. We will be using APOS Insight to compare environments pre- and post-migration to benchmark performance and to ensure security has translated to the new system properly, and to build a list of reports for conversion from Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence.

Read the complete case study.

Dashboard Design and Full-Spectrum BI

In a recent APOS webinar, SAP's Ian Mayor described SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 as a "full-spectrum" approach to business intelligence. While reporting remains the standard for attaining and maintaining operational excellence, the full spectrum approach to BI complements such reporting with mobility (dashboards and apps) and self-serve BI (agile visualization).

Mobility is one of the key themes in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4. Mobility is often cited by customers as a motivation to migrate. The increased emphasis on mobility and agile visualization are portents of the interactive, proactive and collaborative future of BI. This emphasis recognizes that the vast majority of enterprise employees are now knowledge workers who contribute to the enterprise through their interaction with and analysis of enterprise information.

Nowhere is the bright future of mobile BI more clear than in the increased emphasis on dashboards and Web apps. Mobile BI is no longer just for executives. As the role of the dashboard designer becomes more critical to the evolution of BI within the enterprise, SAP's Design Studio offering unites dashboard and Web app design in a single environment.

Using Design Studio, dashboard designers are building engaging experiences for a wide variety of enterprise users. The trend in dashboards is away from static presentations toward customized and interactive presentations, which not only deliver timely information in an easily digested format, but also allow information consumers to explore the data and find what they need quickly.

The transition to Design Studio is not without challenges, and we recently explored those challenges in an SAP Community Network blog post. You can manage some of those challenges with third-party solutions such as the APOS Dashboard Migrator, which will allow you to leverage your Xcelsius investment within Design Studio.

And, as always, there is help available in the APOS Migration Webinar series, particularly in the upcoming April 24 webinar on Design Studio with SAP's Ian Mayor.

APOS Announces Release of Dashboard Migrator for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

APOS Systems Inc., a leading provider of well managed business intelligence (BI) solutions for SAP BusinessObjects, announces its new Dashboard Migrator for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio. The Dashboard Migrator is a plug-in that lets you leverage your existing SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly known as Xcelsius) development in the new SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Design Studio environment. Using the Dashboard Migrator, dashboard developers can embed Xcelsius components and complete dashboards in their Design Studio projects.

Read full press release...

New: Xcelsius Activity Logging with APOS Insight

APOS Insight for SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and BI 4.x now has Xcelsius Activity Logging capabilities.

We've been hearing for some time from platform managers and dashboard designers that they need better ways to understand how their dashboards are being used so that they can improve their dashboards, and thus improve service to their users. As a result, we've added Xcelsius Activity Logging capabilities to APOS Insight.

While native Xcelsius logging (i.e., basic information such as who opened a dashboard and how long they used it) may be adequate for normal day-to-day operations, organizations that want to be proactive in their development and evolution of dashboards need more information. APOS Insight lets you ask much more specific questions about how your dashboards are being used.

The APOS Insight Xcelsius Activity Logging feature uses an add-on to Xcelsius (or Dashboards 4) to configure real-time logging of Xcelsius user activity to the Insight database. To configure logging, you bind the APOS logging control to cells in the spreadsheet that represent property name and value pairs. When a value changes it is logged to the database.

For example, if you want to know which tabs dashboard users are viewing or not viewing, you could bind the APOS Xcelsius Logging control to cells that control tab visibility. Using this and similar types of information for a group of users, developers, administrators and managers can judge how a dashboard is being used, and thus how effective the design of the dashboard is.

SAP's Ian Treleaven: BI4 Sizing Guide Updated

Not long ago, SAP's Ian Treleaven was a guest presenter for two APOS migration-themed webinars on the subject of BI4 sizing:

• Platform Architecture and Sizing for SAP BusinessObjects BI 4
•  SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 Sizing Cases & Demos

We had such a great response to these webinars that we thought we should pass along Ian's message to us that the BI4 Sizing Guide has very recently been updated.

The new guide has many additions to help you get the architecture and sizing of your new BI4 deployment right, including:

• New content to help sizing and performance integration with HANA
• Tips to help you make the CMS run better
• Updated suggested limits for Web Intelligence
• Suggestions for periodic re-sizing
• Pre-sizing and post-sizing checklists to help you prepare for your sizing exercise

Make sure you also visit the companion Website, www.sap.com/bisizing, which also has some updates and new content to help you get your BI4.1 deployment running faster and leaner.

SAP BI 4 Virtualization Best Practices Webinar Alert

When: Jan. 15, 2014, 10 am / 4 pm EST
Another in our series of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 migration-focused webinars

View the recorded webinar.

Guest presenter: Ashish C. Morzaria, Director, Solution Management,
Large Enterprise BI Group, SAP

Virtualization is key to the BI strategy of many organizations. However, the performance penalty for virtualization can be heavy, particularly if you neglect best practices. Some estimates have this virtualization performance hit as high as 40%.

But does virtualization necessarily mean a performance hit? A recent SAP study with VMware, SuperMicro, and SAP’s own Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) suggests the impact can actually be very close to zero — if you implement virtualization properly.

SAP's Ashish C. Morzaria aims to save you from the seemingly inevitable "virtualization tax." Join us as Ashish discusses specific requirements developed by SAP for virtualizing BI 4 and minimizing the impact of virtualization on BI 4 performance.

Data Connectivity and Self-Serve BI

The business case for SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 is fairly simple: embrace SAP's vision of the future of business intelligence, including mobile BI and self-service BI, while lowering your total cost of ownership.

Self-service BI has its upside and its downside. The upside is that anyone in your organization that has access to SAP BusinessObjects can query enterprise data via universes, often with a Web Intelligence report, which allows them to make well informed decisions based on the most current and trusted enterprise information. This benefit justifies the adoption of self-service BI fully.

The downside of self-service BI falls on the platform management and administration side of the story, and it is two-fold. Firstly, self-service BI may lead to a proliferation of content -- more users creating more new reports, report iterations or exploration views, many of which may be for very limited use. If you've already migrated from XI 3 to BI 4, think back to the process you went through to rationalize content prior to migration. Think of self-service BI as a multiplier factor on that process, and you start to see the need for a proactive approach to BI content management. (Look at APOS Storage Center for such an approach.)

Secondly, and more importantly for the day-to-day operations of your BI platform, self-service BI takes some control of the volume and quality of the BI system's data connectivity away from platform managers and administrators and places it squarely in the hands of information consumers. This exchange is necessary for self-service BI to be of any benefit, but administrators are averse to giving up their control over data connectivity, as it impacts their ability to manage effectively and minimize bottlenecks.

If yours is one of those organizations that plan to take greater advantage of self-service BI across the enterprise, then BI data connectivity will become a bigger issue. In an ideal world, your universes would all be so well designed that there would be no issues with query performance, and end users would know better than to test the limits. But we don't live in that world. So your alternative is to monitor BI data connectivity proactively and act decisively to protect the integrity and dependability of your BI platform.

The APOS Intelligent Data Access Controller (IDAC)can help you become proactive with your data connectivity issues. Use it to monitor, manage and audit BI data connectivity. With IDAC, you can:

• Track queries in real time
• Receive automatic alerts when established thresholds are exceeded
• Intervene manually in queries
• Cancel runaway queries automatically
• Audit BI data connectivity