Explorer

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• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is a tool that is intended for rapid interactive analysis of large volumes of data

• Think of it as a BI search engine

• The tool works by indexing large volume of data on dedicated server blades using the SAP HANA or BWA Technology

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Dashboard

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• Dashboards can be built using the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards tool (formerly known as Xcelsius)

• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards was launched in March 2010, and is the flagship product for data visualization and dashboards

• Dashboards can also be highly formatted and static with little user interactive

• In this dashboard we included some KPIs and only the balance sheet for an organization, instead of using Crystal reports for this sort of work.

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Analysis

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The SAP BusinessObjects Analysis tool exists in both:

• MS Office edition

• OLAP edition (web)

• The MS Office edition supports both Excel and PowerPoint

• The tool has a query panel and can embed “live” BI analysis in the Microsoft Office applications Excel and PowerPoint

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Web Intelligence (WebI)

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• WebIntelligence is an on-line web based tool to access the data in an ad-hoc fashion. It can be deployed as a PowerUser tool, or as an end user tool (if the report is simplified and navigation is limited).

• When deploying WebI reports that are linked to a dashboards you should pre-run as many as possible due to the increase in performance (HANA and BWA also helps)

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Crystal

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• Crystal Reports was one of the leading vendors that became part of Business Objects and later SAP.

• Crystal, with its two versions, is great tool for batch reporting of “pixel controlled” formatted reports

• There are some capabilities to do interactive analysis, but it is primarily a tool for structured information access