I was doing some housekeeping on the server tonight, upgrade the Discourse (welcome 2.9.0.beta3 !) and so on, and check also the analytics. It seems that we are more and more visible!
We use to have something like 2,000 distinct users back in December 2020, and nearly 10,000 users on last month! This trend is mainly due to the organic search (93% of last month traffic is organic).
I haven’t check this side (yes I know there is not a lot of thread created each month), but at least this project found its public, so I am happy to help running something useful. Thanks community!
Thats great, however, to me it seems that participation is very low (replies to threads). Personally, i had a discussion/question and its been weeks that anyone cared to respond. I understand it may not be clear or “not knowledgeable enough to respond” but i turned to SAP forum and got responses. Just my opinion.
The root cause of that is SAP themselves. Their failure to keep BusinessObjects competitively priced and to provide a good dashboard solution that plays nicely with universes has cost them a huge amount of market share (certainly in the UK). Power BI and other solutions have entered the market and stolen huge swathes of customers - as a result, fewer users and fewer participants on these boards.
I don’t actively use it at work any more, but like to keep my hand in. Sadly, I only have XI3 installed at home so cannot check 4.x formulae when replying. Most of the logic still stands, though, from when I first picked up the tool over 25 years ago.
How many different dashboard products has SAP tried and failed to get going? If they had just put all those resources directly into WebI and improved it’s dashboarding capabilities at a reasonable price point, they would have been hard/impossible to compete with.
Now hearing people jumping ship from Tableau b/c the costs are sky rocketing.
Correct. I’ve built dashboards in both SSRS and Webi. To have pre-canned visualisation widgets in Webi that you then put your dimensions, measures and variables on would be such a straightforward approach to dashboarding. After all these years, we’ve learned that there are only so many ways to effectively tell a story (compared to ways not to) via a dashboard. Throw in the zero-effort linking from Webi dashboards to detailed Webi reports and it makes so much sense to do it as one product now.
This trend is mainly due to the organic search (93% of last month traffic is organic).