Archive for November, 2010
Reporting Remix #3
Here I am at the end of the Reportapalooza journey, a bit melancholy, a bit relieved, but overall better for having done it. It’s hard to believe that the journey began back in mid August and now we are fast approaching Thanksgiving.
Our last task was to blog about one of the Crystal Solutions Products we either did not know or knew little about over a 3 week period. Honestly, I thought there wasn’t much to talk about with Crystal Dashboard Designer (formerly known as Xcelsius) but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I chose it because it was the only product that I knew little about either because I chose not to or did not have the opportunity. Sometimes life’s greatest lessons are those learned through a controlled choice (forced). Now don’t get me wrong, no one twisted my arm and said I had to do anything, all I am saying is that of all the choices I have to make during the day, choosing to learn more about Crystal Dashboard Designer would not have been high on my uncontrolled list.
Like I said in my opening paragraph I am leaving this experience better for having gone through it. I would like to say that I am an accomplished BI Solutions expert and that I can speak well on most SAP BusinessObjects Products. What I have learned through my weeks with Crystal Dashboard Designer is that I still have a lot to learn.
Crystal Dashboard Designer
We are visual beings. We use sight from the time we open our eyes in the morning until the time our head hits the pillow at night. So it should come as no surprise that the things that get our attention are the things that we find visually appealing. I never thought of generating reports as glamorous or sexy, I mean really? It’s a bunch of numbers and some words, a graph or two and maybe a page count with the summaries. Using Crystal Dashboard Designer is the tool that brings sexy back.
Now granted your Dashboard may not get you on the cover of Vogue, but it will get you the attention of CEOs and CIOs within your organization. Here is a tool whose output you can give to these very busy individuals that is portable, interactive, informative and customizable.
I learned that this tool is not just an extension of an Excel Workbook, but a powerful and rich way to attract and interact your user and your data. There is a big and vibrant community both inside and outside of SAP that are enthusiastic about the product and answering your questions. There are numerous partners that have great add-ons for this product that take your presentations to a new level.
I am a little sad that I won’t be getting on conference calls to talk to Mico, Jamie, Jim and David over this shared topic. While this was touted as a competition I feel it was more of a collaboration of friends. We had to balance our already hectic schedules with sometimes near impossible deadlines and technical difficulties. It was the support of my fellow Reportapalooza Experts that I persevered and to them I give thanks.
To my supporters through this journey I want to give special thanks. I know you were cringing towards the end every time you saw another Email from me thinking “what does he want me to vote on now?” Well just one more vote through an Email with a bit.ly attached 
What ever position I finish in I will have still won.
Reporting Remix #2
The weeks seem to be blending into each other. It seems like it was just yesterday when I put up my last post. Well it was a week ago today and this is what I have learned.
Web Service Connection:
I want to say that the more I learn, the less I know. Over the weekend is about the only time I have to work on projects of any sort. So I dedicated this weekend to learning about the connection types I had promised in last week’s blog. I started by creating a new Dashboard and my first Web Service Connection. The first parameter in the dialog box was to enter the WSDL URL? Huh? A WSDL or Web Service Definition Language as I come to understand it is a XML document that defines web services as collections of network endpoints, or ports. This in its simplest form allows communication between the message (request), service (WSDL) and the source. OK, cool so what is this good for?
So out on the internet I went to look for WSDL URL’s and what I found was a service (WSDL) that retrieved the current bid information for an EBay item. So what can I do with this? Well it would be cool for me personally but what about a real business application? That is when I came across the currency converter. Again I asked myself what practical application can I use this new found toy?
I took a break and walked my dogs to let things stew for a while. Then it came to me, how about a Dashboard that helped an international business decide when to buy a particular product or good from a country based upon the exchange rate?
So I went through the relatively simple exercise of creating the Web Service Connection. In the WSDL URL I entered http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx?WSDL and selected import. Voila! OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but it was nice.
In the Input values side I selected From Currency and the Read From became active. I bound this to a range of cells in my worksheet. I did this again for the Output Values and bound a similar range next to the Input range.
I won’t bore you with the other details, but instead I will publish my Dashboard this weekend after it’s cleaned up. What I will tell you is that the Dashboard allows my fake business to see where they can buy their fake products the cheapest based on the current exchange rate.
Query as a Web Service (QAAWS)
So when I told you last week that I was going to look into QAAWS I had no idea that it was nearly identical to Web Service Connection. Honestly, I was not trying to cheat and kill two birds with one stone. So I took my dogs for another walk. I realized during my walk that the main and most important difference is that QAAWS is used so that you can talk to your Business Objects environment.
We use QAAWS to populate a Server Health dashboard. This Dashboard was created by my co-workers Tina Robertson and Sridhar Rangabhashyam. She created the code to extract Server Health information from our various BO Environments. Tina Robertson created the Universe and Dashboard. In the end we have a single view of the health of our various BO environments. For those Administrators out there wouldn’t it be nice to look at a dashboard and only have to worry about yellow or red indicators instead of looking at the individual health indicators in every system?
This was accomplished by installing the Service in the BusinessObjects environment and establishing a reference to a BusinessObjects Universe. The URL that is created now becomes the WSDL URL used the values needed for my Query as a Web Service Dashboard connection.
Centigon GMaps
I told you last week that it was a last minute dash to put in a map in my Charity Dashboard challenge. I looked at the various options that are out there and found that Centigon’s GMaps was the easiest to use right out of the box.
I wanted to add some more “WOW” to the functionality of the GMaps but ran out of time. So when I talked with the Founder and CEO Ryan Goodman I told him about some of the things I wanted to but could not because of time. Ryan told me about some of the example Dashboards they have on their website that showcased some of the various solutions they had.
One thing I wanted to do was put the Client information in Rows not a continuous string. Ryan told me that I could use HTML code for a hard coded return to achieve this.
Second, I wanted to either launch a new Dashboard or report. Again, I can imbed either the Open Document call from BusinessObjects or just a simple hyperlink to maybe the Client’s website?
The third thing I talked about was why couldn’t I just use a street address and have GMaps find the coordinates. Ryan paused a moment and said that it already does that. Boy did I feel dumb. I had gone out iTouch Maps and put in several client addresses, got the latitude and longitude and placed this information in to Excel, bound the cell to the map….. You see where I am going. I did all the work that was already built in to the product.
This last topic started me thinking about how I can bring this in to my work and drive business. So for those managers or business analysts out there pay attention. We now have two great tools, Dashboard Designer and GMaps. We can connect to our BusinessObjects environment through QAAWS to retrieve Sales data, we can display the data in GMaps with location pins set with threshold values to visually alert us when conditions are met. You can now look at a map and see if a certain area is affected that might indicate a trend or problem. Personally I think this beats just running a report, creating an alerter, grouping the stores based upon the alerter and then trying to figure out of they are located near each other or in a particular sales area.
All in all it was a productive weekend. The dogs received a lot of fresh air and exercise. I learned that I need to continue to challenge myself outside of work to keep relevant and bring value to what I do and my community.