Hello. I’m a newbie to the Excelsius world, though I’ve been in BOXI for a while.
Currently I’m under task to develop a scorecard. We don’t have Excelsius yet, though I think we will sometime within the next 12 months. However, the scorecard must proceed now, of course, with a short term plan for implementation, and then when Excelsius is brought in it will need to move.
I can build a reasonable scorecord that meets short-term expectations in either Crystal or WebI. I know both of those objects can be embedded into Excelsius, so the work won’t be totally throwaway. My question is, what tool should I use? Is WebI or Crystal better to start with, with the idea that I want to keep as much work as possible to be reusable? Is one easier than the other in Excelsius? Is one faster? This scorecard will have approx 50 measures, with drilldown, etc, and I’m worried that WebI will not be as fast as Crystal. However, if we do WebI, it may be possible to get some help from other less technical folks to build the reports.
I’ve been combing the web, and can find comparisons of WebI to Crystal, but haven’t found good information on comparing them within Excelsius. Does anyone have an opinion to share on how you would do this, if you were starting over with Excelsius knowing what you do now? I’d sure appreciate any thoughts.
You really don’t embed WebI or Crystal content into an Xcelsius dashboard. A common practice is to have links from the Dashboard (usually through drills) to OpenDocument URLs that will open WebI (or Crystal) documents based on the context of the dashboard (i.e. the document would expect parameters in the URL, passed from the Dashboard) for detailed analysis. I’ve only done this with WebI, since I feel it has the most analytical functionality that complements the dashboard vs. Crystal (but I’m biased more toward what I know, and I have a lot more experience with WebI).
So if you are getting started with a Dashboard project, it would be valuable to create you WebI (or Crystal content), but I would focus it on the ‘detailed’ reports, which you would eventually link in to the dashboard. And it will give you a good feel for the back end data solution, which is critical for the implementation of the dashboard.
Not having Xcelsius right now may be a blessing in disguise. Assuming that you will be using a universe, make sure that your data is very targetted, highly aggregated, so that you are using Xcelsius as a presentation layer and not to perform all kinds of calculations in that layer.
Yes, data presented into the model should be at the grain that you want it presented. You can of course create calculations of the data within the model, but aggregation should be done on the backend data source. We leverage MDDBs and/or CubeViews to handle aggregations for performance.
There has been several debates on this, but we continue to find folks going about it the wrong way.
A dashboard (Xcelsius) should be presenting operational metrics in a summary format.
If you really want to drill down and perform analysis to find out the root cause and such, use a tool (WebI) which is built for that purpose.
That Xcelsius supports a bit of drill down through dynamic visibility and insert functionality in no way makes it comparable with WebI.
Your detail data and analysis should always be with WebI instead of in Xcelsius.
If you’re thinking of creating dashboards to drill and analyze data, you have the wrong ideas and very soon you’ll run into problems where you’re stuck with Xcelsius and keep cursing it for not scaling up.
A proper way may be middle-of the way which allows you to start on Xcelsius but move on using opendocument links to WebI or Crystal for further analysis as gjelmore has suggested.
We got the Same problem, our Users want to drill in to dimensions in Xcelsius and want to see every thing in Xcelsius, At last we end up building a OLAP report instead of a Dashboard.
All the Sample models in Business objects are misleading the Clients.
Any detailed report must be attached to dashboard as an opendoc
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