David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

In this article I’d like to express my concerns about SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design AKA Xcelsius for what I’ve seen in the last 2 years. With SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards FP3 I was hoping to see some light; unfortunately it’s been quite dismal.

When I first started using Xcelsius in 2006, it was leading edge and produced dashboards that had the WOW factor that other dashboard solutions did not have.  When Xcelsius 2008 came out, there were big improvements over Xcelsius 4.5 and many people were happy.

However since Xcelsius 2008 SP3, development has lagged substantially most likely due to the changing of technologies (ie: HTML5 and Mobile), allowing other competitors such as Dundas Dashboards, Microstrategy, Tableau, etc to catch up and surpass Xcelsius.  There have been loads of enhancement requests on SAP Ideaplace, however it seems like most have been ignored.

I’ve put some important and very easy to implement requests in 2010, and none of these have ever been implemented which is very disappointing.  I’m not sure what has led to the lack of competency but rumour has it that the core Xcelsius team had disbanded and the development team is now a mess.  Don’t quote me on this as I am just saying what others who are internal to SAP have told me.  Maybe they have started picking up their pieces with the port to HTML5, but its still no excuse for what we’ve been seeing for the past couple of years.  Even if SAP is heading to another direction for dashboards whether it be explorer views, zen or webi, it doesn’t mean that they should stagnate their existing dashboard product so severely.  In addition it wont be for a few more years before all the changes play out.  So does that mean we are stuck with subpar dashboards for the next couple of years?  Many of my clients are complaining about Xcelsius’ lack of features and limitations vs other dashboard tools.  In a few years lots of things can happen, and many clients can jump ship to another solution.  Once they jump ship, it’s going to be hard to win them back.  Just look at what happened with the Blackberry (Too little too late)!

In the last 2 years I can probably count with 1 hand the number of useful new features, which I’ll give credit to.

For example the introduction of BI Web Services (not totally Xcelsius but close enough) was revolutionary in my opinion.

The Universe Query browser is pretty useful for binding to selectors, however with data queries we will leave that to BI Web Services.

The waterfall chart, ability to insert alerts in the spreadsheet table, and ability to insert alerts for multiple series in a combo chart are also very useful.

There might be a couple more, but is that sufficient for 2 years?

Now I’ll list items that many of my clients have been requesting for the longest time.  Perhaps if someone from SAP sees this, it’ll have more pull then through the SAP Ideaplace.  Also if we are very lucky, maybe they’ll even implement these simple to develop features for FP3/SP4, so let’s cross our fingers .

Critical Items

1. The ability to control the selected item for a drilldown chart and not autoclick everytime the data changes

On the combo box, radio, list box, and label selector components we are able to dynamically bind the selected item.  I’m pretty sure it would be easy to do the same for all chart drilldowns, since we are currently able to choose the initial drilldown item.

In addition, most selectors have the option to Insert on Data Change and Interaction or Interaction Only.  Thus I’m sure this would also be simple to implement for chart drilldowns.

It is a common requirement for users to click on drilldown bar and then have a child popup come up, however because we get an autoclick everytime data changes, the popup will automatically pop up whenever data changes, which is undesired.  The only way around this is to add an extra “drilldown” button which forces the user to first select a drilldown bar and then click on the button.  Whenever, I bring this workaround up to my clients, they give me a what the hell type of response.

2. Can’t dynamically control the selection for most selectors.

We are currently able to dynamically control the selection for the combo box, radio, list box, and label selector components.  However, all the other components we can only set the initial selection.

What if we have users that have different profiles and want a different initial selection? Well we can’t do it!

For example if we had a set of checkboxes, we can’t control the on/off state dynamically which is very important.  Another example why we need to be able to dynamically turn on or off checkboxes would be in a scenario where the checkbox is an “All selected” checkbox.  If we select something else from another list, we may want to uncheck the “All selected” checkbox.  But without the dynamic select ability there is no way to accomplish this.

It is a common requirement for the spreadsheet table or scorecard selector to dynamically change it’s selection.  There is a workaround using a transparent listbox (link).  However this forces us to add unnecessary effort.

The filter selector is a great component, but the inability to control the initial selected state renders it almost useless when users with different profiles are involved.  If we want a dynamic filter selector with 3 hierachies, we’ll need to create 3 combo box selectors instead of just using 1 filter selector.

I am certain that this is an elementary task to implement as all you need to do is copy the bind option logic from selectors that have such as the dropdown selector, radio selector, etc.

3.  BI Web Services does not allow dynamic column lengths. 

For example I can not have 1 BI Service connection for a service that can either return a block with 6 months trend or 12 months trend.  Thus if I have a region trend block and both the region and time can be dynamic.  We must use multiple BI Web Service connections in Xcelsius to do this which is very cumbersome.

When I presented this at SAP Insidetrack 2011 in Vancouver, I had one guy ask me in front of everyone “How can this be possible? Are you sure you can’t do it? A limitation as simple as this is rediculous!”.  I responded by telling him that BI Web Services is still immature and there is still much work to be done.

4. Hierarchical components only work with BEX and OLAP Data Sources

I put an entry 2 years ago on SAP Ideaplace about the tree explorer component that would perform what the Inovista Microcharts tree explorer does.  Funny thing is they implemented it, but allowing only BEX and OLAP data sources to use it.  Well what about the other 90% of Xcelsius Dashboards based on relational databases? Come on guys! This one is elementary!

5.  No way to do multiselect!

This is one of the biggest requests that people have been asking for!  There is a primitive way to do it using the list builder component, but I always advise my clients to never use this because it is large, cumbersome and just a big nono on real estate!  If we could have a multi checkbox or multi list box component similar to what is available in the WEBI input controls that would be great!

With SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4 we can perform multiselect with the query browser, however we can not take advantage of the ability to load dimensions using BI Web Services.

6.  No way of doing smart search on selector components. 

These days something as simple as typing in a letter and having the selector go to the nearest selection is available almost everywhere.  However, not with the Xcelsius selector components.  Even dropdowns in the component properties have this feature, so how difficult can it be to extend it to the selector components?

7.  The tooltip in the bullet chart is terrible and cannot be changed! 

On the toolbar users will always see the text Performance and Comparative no matter what.  The inability to change this renders the bullet chart useless as users will wonder what Performance and Comparative mean.  Also there is no way to control the middle color of the gauge bar.  So there is no way to create a gauge bar that is red, yellow, green.  It will be red, (red and green mixed), green.  I don’t mean to be rude but whoever was in charge of implementing this component should be fired!

8.  There is currently a bug where we can not filter on WEBI Variables in BI Web Services. 

If you try to filter on a WEBI variable, you will receive the following error
“Cannot Access External Data: Argument Exception: Enable to apply filter on formulae object”

The last I heard from SAP that they are working on this, but let’s see if they will keep their word.

Important Items

1. Pie chart tool tip always show 2 decimal places

There’s no way to modify the pie chart so that it shows anything other than 2 decimal places for the percentages

2. Can not auto trigger the push button

It would be very nice if we could auto trigger the push button to push certain values to a particular area if needed.  Currently the only way we can do this is trigger a query, and then have the query populate an area with the appropriate data

Conclusion

Well I hope you guys found my rant useful and I’m sure a lot of you are as frustrated as I am.  I really hope that SAP sees this and really takes a look on their short term plans with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.  At the end of the day we all want SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to become a better product, but without any sort of push or shove, I don’t think this is possible.

If there are additional limitations that you are frustrated with, please post them in the comments section.  Thanks!