A Q&A with Dashboards in SAP BI

After returning from the SAPInsider BI2015 event in Las Vegas, I wrote a blog on my personal experiences from the perspective of a presenter, sponsor and exhibitor.  That blog, hopefully, will be posted very soon.  The two days that I was there were certainly intense.  During the course of my time at BI2015, I gave a session on building Executive Level Dashboards using SAP Dashboards.  We had some very interesting questions about name clarification, tool selection and longevity of the tool.  I wanted to give some interesting questions posed by the attendees of my sessions and give my thoughts on them.

Question: SAP Dashboards means Xcelsius and not Design Studio?

My Response: When the SAP BI Platform 4.0 was released, SAP renamed a few of their tools.  The InfoView portal from prior versions of SAP BusinessObjects was renamed to LaunchPad.  SAP attempted to rename Web Intelligence as Interactive Analysis and even went as far as updating the support site and documentation as Interactive Analysis or IA.  After some rebellion, SAP kept the original Web Intelligence name (but didn’t change the support site or document references!).

The professionally authored dashboarding product Xcelsius was renamed to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.  Colloquially, Dashboards is still referred to as Xcelsius.  So when we mention Dashboards (which can also refer to the generic dashboarding term), we mean the former Xcelsius application.  When we say Xcelsius, we mean SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.

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 About Chris Hickman

Chris is a certified SAP BusinessObjects consultant. His specific areas of expertise include reporting,  analysis, dashboard development and visualization techniques. Chris’ software development  background has enabled him to achieve proven effectiveness in architecting, developing, testing and  supporting both desktop and web-based applications for many customer engagements representing various industries. Chris also speaks globally at SAP and ASUG events.