Monday, June 26, 2023

APOS Publisher for Cloud – SAP Analytics Amplification – Enterprise Broadcasting

SAP Analytics Cloud provides intuitive self-service analytics to let you explore data across your organization and develop insights to inform decision-making at all levels of the enterprise. It takes you from data to analysis to insight and delivers that insight within your SAP Analytics Cloud community.

But what do you do to amplify those insights and put them in front of stakeholders outside your immediate SAP Analytics Cloud environment? Effective amplification of your Analytics insights requires an enterprise broadcasting strategy. Broadcasting effectively gets information to the right people, at the right time, and in the right format.

APOS Publisher for Cloud – Enabling Enterprise Broadcasting

APOS Publisher for Cloud provides automated broadcasting of SAP Analytics Cloud reports to targeted recipients and information consumers.

APOS Publisher for Cloud promotes effective enterprise broadcasting with:

Automation: integrated scheduling, conditional broadcasting, user-based broadcasting
Scalability: high availability, failover, distributed and targeted processing
Personalization: dynamic rules, filters and variables, formats and destinations, consolidation
Flexibility: export options, widget-level broadcasting

Automation: Integrated Scheduling, Conditional & User-Based Broadcasting

APOS Publisher for Cloud has all the core elements of enterprise broadcasting functionality, including integrated scheduling, conditional broadcasting, and BW and Datasphere user-based broadcasting.

Users can schedule broadcasting definitions from within the Publisher for Cloud user interface. There are ways you can schedule reports – hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly – right from the user interface and have them take effect immediately. With integrated conditional broadcasting, APOS Publisher for Cloud can monitor your data and conditionally broadcast based on pre-defined events. In addition, it can monitor certain KPIs on your stories and trigger a broadcast on whether those KPIs are above or below a pre-defined threshold.

Publisher for Cloud can filter data by recipient, ensuring everyone gets their own slice of data, but using SAP BW and Datasphere, we can also automatically broadcast BW- or Datasphere-based stories while respecting the row-level authorizations from BW or Datasphere live connections.

High Availability, Failover, Distributed & Targeted Processing

APOS Publisher for Cloud provides scalability with distributed (and targeted) processing, high availability, and failover.

We have customers that need high volumes of documents to be created and sent out in a timely manner, and over a short period of time. APOS Publisher for Cloud can scale up to support high volumes and rapid broadcasting with distributed processing. You can deploy two or more distributed processing servers to manage the workload of the broadcasting definition evenly across those servers, creating scalability options for processing, as well as high availability and failover. We can also set up multiple scheduling servers and replicate your APOS Publisher for Cloud database, enabling high availability with redundancy and failover. If failures occur on your servers, your content re-routes to other servers to ensure delivery.

If you do have two or more processing servers, targeted processing lets you target a specific processing server. Customers may have important or critical broadcasting definitions that they need to broadcast as soon as possible, so they may target a specific processing server that may have higher RAM and CPU usage, or the target server may have specific products such as Microsoft Office so the user knows they will be able to format the reports as needed.

Dynamic Rules, Filters & Variables

APOS Publisher for Cloud’s dynamic, security driven processes with filters and variables to ensure recipients get only the data to which they are entitled.

You can determine and control what information is included for each recipient, as well as when and in what format the information is sent. These personalization details are accessed from a data source which can be set up very quickly and easily. Any of the components or any of the properties in the broadcast can be read from that data source, and this is especially useful when it comes to filters and variables. This makes it simple to define rules, filters and variables that control the broadcasts dynamically for each recipient. Your data controlling the broadcasts can be any ODBC or OLEDB compliant data source, ranging from a simple spreadsheet to an S/4HANA system.

Formats, Destinations, Report Consolidation

APOS Publisher for Cloud’s tailored formats and destinations and consolidation of multiple reports ensure recipients get information in the formats and destinations that work for them.

The most common destinations for report delivery are email and network file share. There are also many organizations who are now requiring FTP as a report delivery destination.

The most common report formats are PDF and Excel, but PowerPoint is also becoming more popular. And of course images are popular in e-mail destinations in combination with attachments of PDF or Excel reports. You can consolidate information from a number of reports because recipients may only one or two pages from one report and another page from a different report. Consolidation brings these pages together into a single document.

Export Options, Widget-Level Broadcasting

APOS Publisher for Cloud’s widget-level broadcasting, multiple export options, provide flexibility and granular control.

The report export options of APOS Publisher for Cloud enable users to receive the information from the report in one or many different formats. For example, you can combine PowerPoint, Excel and PDF into one document. Another example: have one user receive the report in PDF and another receive the report in PowerPoint or Excel, or any other format. With Excel, we often need high-volume export. When you view a report on the screen, you see perhaps only fifty rows. But the entire grid may contain thousands of rows and users often want to be able to export that high volume to an Excel spreadsheet.

Using an Excel template enables us to use dynamic color coding, but Publisher for Cloud can also export a report with many rows in it to an Excel workbook.

At times you may only want to pick certain components of a particular report page and send those out. Publisher for Cloud’s widget-level broadcasting capabilities allows you to focus on the most critical information and tailor the distribution so that the user receives only the pieces of information that are really important to them. For example, you may have a page that contains a large amount of information, but you really want to focus on a pie chart and that is the specific information you want to export when you broadcast to your recipients, so they receive only what they need and no extraneous information.