I attended this webcast last week sponsored by APOS. SAP's Ian Mayor discussed Dashboards and Design Studio.
Hopefully everyone has seen this:
Figure 1: Source: SAP
Ian showed other similar slides covered in other blogs, so I won't cover here.
Figure 2: Source: SAP
Ian explained that the plan is to "bring together in one common experience, one common tool" for dashboards to address the needs of customers.
This includes mobility to consume on mobile devices, provide compelling visuals.
The plan in Figure 2 is to provide simplification, unification, one tool to build dashboards no matter how you are delivering them
He explained it is a three phase roll out.
Last year, 2013 the first phase was mobile theme; focused on HTML5 for Dashboards– re-render dashboards in HTML5
They want to catch Design Studio up to same level of visualizations, add-ons for SDKs, and customization
The next year is the unify phase, and bring together, merger them into Design Studio
They are expanding data connectivity – new future proof tool
HTML5 is the base rendering – regardless of the device
They plan to introduce migration tools to help convert XC dashboards and BEx web templates into the new environment
One tool for the future; not plan to force migration as it is difficult to retire existing content
Existing BEx web templates & XC dashboards will keep going - focus on future innovations efforts
Design Studio
Design Studio was launched a little over a year ago
It was very focused on BEx Web Application Designer user base
Version 1.2 expands out of SAP with the Universe support
It releases every 6 months
Then the APOS team spoke about their APOS plug in – a SWF XCelsius file into Design Studio to help transition
Figure 3: Source: APOS
APOS has a Beta program to help move from Xcelsius to Design Studio – contact them on their web site at apos.com
Figure 4: Source: APOS
Figure 4 is a sample beta of XCelsius dashboard inside Design Studio
Question & Answer
Q: What versions of BI platform do you need for Design Studio? Do you need to be on 4.1?
A: DS supports 4.0 SP6 or higher – BI4.1 – if you want Universe support you need to be on 4.1
Q: How is Design Studio licensed?
A: No additional license for Design Studio – it is included in the Dashboard license
It is a separate download and add-on
Need to go on SMP to download Design Studio
If you are licensed for Dashboards and can’t see Design Studio contact Ian Mayor
Q: How does Design Studio relate to Explorer, Web Intelligence?
A: It follows traditional BI model – a single author is trained in the tool and publishes content to end users
Explorer is a self service tool
Web Intelligence is a reporting tool while Design Studio is designed for interactive applications
Q: How is Lumira different than Design Studio?
A: Design Studio – for professional creator while Lumira is a self-service tool
My take: the XCelsius application inside Design Studio SDK is interesting and I wonder if customers will try it out.
Also, as an FYI, the Design Studio Roadmap was updated this past week - see https://websmp206.sap-ag.de/~sapidb/011000358700000390622012D.pdf (SMP logon required)
Interested in learning more? BI 2014 in March has Design Studio sessions, such as this one: Leveraging SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio to deploy data-driven BI applications across Web and mobile platforms