Can somebody possibly give me (or point me to) a rundown of how Xcelsius versions work these days?
We’re still on 2008 SP5 (5.5.0.0) running as a full client version on my pc. We’re now just about licensed for BI4 but I’m not sure what I should be asking for as regards Xcelsius as the licensing was always handled separately here. I’d like to know what versions are now available. Are they still accessed as a full client option on my pc (as Designer still is?).
2008 was the last version of Xcelsius, under that name.
After that, the branding was changed to SAP Dashboard Designer. (Because SAP has no idea how SEO works.) The versioning was also changed to match BO. So you have Dashboards 4.0 and 4.1.Xclesius and Dashboards are the same product.
There are two other competing products in the SAP library. Lumira is a data discovery and visualization tool. But it is important to note that it is intended for discovery and not dashboards. Just because it produces pretty charts doesn’t mean it’s a replacement for Xcelsius.
The other is Design Studio. I haven’t played with DS myself, but reports indicate that it is the intended replacement for Xcelsius. The primary fault it is intended to fix is that Xcelsius is not mobile friendly, being completely attached to Flash. Reviews indicate that it is not quite ready for prime time yet.
Thanks, Lugh. I’ve seen Lumira and the visual intelligence stuff and spent ages trying to explain to people that it isn’t a dashboard and that for every pretty visualisation, somebody has to set it up and keep it fed … I do wish companies would stop coming in and giving non-techy management the hard sell, without explaining what has to be done under the bonnet before the car will run!
Is Design Studio not available yet, then? Apparently our new licensing agreement covers SAP Dashboard Designer - would you recommend I upgrade to this or do I work on the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach! The last Xcelsius upgrade caused me no end of issues as components started behaving differently.
My tech-guys tell me I can have either SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1 or SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.4
At the moment I have several complex dashboards with multiple components. Each dashboard calls the other dashboards via the url of the relevant SWF/HTML on the web server. They are populated via XML data files. Any opinions on which I should consider upgrading to? Seems silly not to go straight to the mots recent, but how stable is it? I’m finding lots of stuff online, but nothing recent enough to make an inforned decision.
DesignStudio is way different from former Xcelsius, e.g. javascript, no MS Excel layer, etc. If you can I suggest waiting, maybe one to two weeks on my upcoming, first ever blog “Migration Walker” on SAP SCN to get some more insights into typical challenges when migrating from XC to DS.
It might very well be, that you do require both, XC AND DesignStudio (current is version 1.4).
Thanks, Andreas. Please let me know when you publish!
I’m desperately trying to prove to other departments here that they really don’t need to go out and waste money on new shiny toys, when we have in-house even shinier toys that will do the job just as well!
I’ve just found a Microsoft Analysis thingy and a Sharepoint integration whatsit on our new licensing list. It’s like Christmas all over again…
Andreas, I’d be fascinated to read that article, too. We’ve got a copy of Design Studio, but have been balking at the work required to convert our dashboards.
The new Dashboard Designer does have a few nice new features. They really upgraded how connections work, giving you a lot more options and much finer control. However, the actual components still pretty much work the same as Xcelsius 2008. If they’re willing to spring for the license, I’d take it.
After all, once you export to SWF, you don’t HAVE to upgrade the existing dashboard. You could keep a spare laptop around with 2008 on it to maintain the older dashboards while slowly converting them.
Guess I’m just living the sweet contractor life. I have a laptop provided by my company, another laptop provided by the government, and an obsolete laptop that the company said I could just keep because they couldn’t hand it off to anyone else.
And, of course, my personal laptop, which may or may not have needed to get Xcelsius installed one weekend to fix a problem, and then never got uninstalled.
I went to see our software/support suppliers on Monday and got a demo of Design Studio. From the bug-eyed initial reaction , I got kind of into the idea of scripting everything…
Biggest drawback for me is not being able to connect directly to XML - yes, I can apparently run stored procedures etc, but the way I work now (aspx script to generate/grab xml data) is quick, flexible and platform-independent. I don’t like the idea of having to design a UNX universe to query for data - it’s an extra layer of faff and introduces too many dependencies.
Tried to find your blog “Migration Walker”, did you ever publish that? Would love to read on it.
Also, i tried to download an evaluation copy of DS and install it but it seems like its way different than Dashboards or Xcelsius since it needs to be installed on the server. I then decided not to install it in case it wiped out our custom portal and such.
(BOB member since 2005-03-01)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
, I got kind of into the idea of scripting everything…