Thursday, May 26, 2023
Webinar Summary – BTP Presentation - Enhanced Enterprise Report Broadcasting for SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP’s BTP Adoption Program Team recently hosted a presentation and panel on broadcasting for SAP Analytics Cloud. APOS Chief Operating Officer and APOS Solution Consulting Manager Alan Golding delivered the presentation on Enhanced Enterprise Report Broadcasting for SAP Analytics Cloud.
The recording of this webinar is available only to the attendees, but here I provide a summary of the presentation and discussion.
Allan noted that APOS has developed three solutions for SAP Analytics Cloud:
APOS Live Data Gateway was the subject of an earlier BTP presentation by APOS (summary here).
The Need for “Push” Broadcasting
Allan Pym described the need for pushing content out to information consumers, noting that recipients may have any number of different roles, both within and outside of the organization running SAP Analytics Cloud.
Organizations and users coming from SAP BusinessObjects may be accustomed to broader broadcasting capabilities.
…as are organizations using SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office and BEx Broadcaster.
The Need for Personalized Information
Because information recipients occupy many different roles, they often need information personalized.
APOS Publisher for Cloud helps you meet these personalization needs, letting you slice information so that, for example, different members of your sales team receive the same SAP Analytics Cloud report, but each receives only the information that is relevant to them, and to which they are entitled by your data source security.
Alan Golding then described the architecture of the APOS Publisher for Cloud solution, noting that the solution is installed behind your corporate firewall on a Windows server, accesses your SAP Analytics Cloud stories using any one of a variety of SSO technologies, uses a bursting definition to slice the information, and pushes the reports out to a variety of formats and locations.
APOS Publisher for Cloud – Core Broadcasting Functions
Alan then described the core broadcasting functions of APOS Publisher for Cloud
Dynamic Rules:
- Dynamically drive your bursting definition rules using a data source.
- Connect to any data source that supports ODBC or OLEDB.
- Scale to higher volume with minimal effort.
Filters/Variables
- Dynamically add filter and variable values.
- Create multiple versions of the same story with ease.
Destinations
- Email
- Network File Share
- FTP/FTPS/SFTP
Formats
- PDF
- Excel with data
- CSV
- PowerPoint
- JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, BMP
- Microsoft Word
- RTF
- Customize Excel and PowerPoint templates to polish your content.
Consolidation of Reports
- Consolidate multiple stories/pages to a single email/document.
- Minimize the number of emails a given user receives.
- Summarize all reports into one email/document
Export Options
- All popular output formats are available (Word, PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, image).
- Multiple formats can be created by a single bursting definition (e.g., an Excel spreadsheet and PDF file can be created simultaneously).
- Export large data sets to Excel/CSV.
- High-volume, high-performance export.
Widget Level Bursting
- Burst components of reports selectively – define which widget from which report page will be sent to recipients.
- Focus on the most critical information.
- Tailor distribution of targeted information.
- Simplify users’ consumption of information.
Alan demonstrated these core functions and then moved on to describe the advanced broadcasting capabilities of APOS Publisher for Cloud
Integrated Enterprise Scheduling
APOS Publisher for Cloud provides integrated schedule creation.
What this means is that you can prepare your hourly, daily, weekly or monthly schedule right from the Bursting Definition screen where your recipients and the information they receive are defined.
Integrated Conditional Broadcasting
Conditional broadcasting:
- Monitors KPI data thresholds
- Automatically triggers broadcasting processes when thresholds are exceeded
- Sends out alert notification emails
This conditional broadcasting functionality is integrated with SAP Datasphere.
Alan described a use case showing how conditional broadcasting can be used. Some APOS customers have needs beyond traditional scheduling. For example, a customer may have live connectivity to BW and they are not able to use the normal scheduling process, because their schedules are dependent on intermittent uploads from BW. They set up a conditional broadcasting alert to monitor a field that tells them the data upload has occurred. When the alert occurs, the scheduling process is automatically triggered and the SAC report is broadcast.
BW/Datasphere User-Based Broadcasting
User-based broadcasting enforces the row-level security of BW and Datasphere users with live connections to those SAP platforms. Rather than setting up filters for these users, APOS Publisher for Cloud renders the story on behalf of these users applying their row-level security. Thus a number of BW or Datasphere user may receive the same SAC report, but each will contain only the data for which they have permissions.
Distributed Processing
APOS Publisher for Cloud includes features that provide enterprise scalability.
You can set up multiple processing servers to ensure high-performance and high-volume broadcasting.
High Availability and Failover
Create enterprise scalability by configuring multiple Scheduling and Processing servers. You might wish to do this to ensure that critical reports do not get caught in bottlenecks. A recurring schedule may be time sensitive. Setting up multiple Scheduling and Processing servers creates failover capability to ensure timely delivery.
Targeted Processing
You can specify the Processing server to be used to process your broadcast. You might wish to do this if a particular server has the needed RAM or CPU power for this particular broadcast, or if the broadcast includes Microsoft Office documents and therefore needs Microsoft Office installed on the server.
Security and Permissions
APOS Publisher for Cloud provides enterprise-level security, including shared and private data sources, and shared and private bursting definitions.
These features enable personal workspace, as well as collaboration within groups, while excluding users from other groups.
Enhanced Security
The APOS Publisher for Cloud administrator defines users and user groups and grants access and rights.
Enhanced Administration
The APOS Publisher for Cloud administrator can monitor activity and address issues as they arise
Resources
There are numerous resources available on the APOS website to help you learn more about APOS Publisher for Cloud, including our Developing a BEx Broadcasting Replacement Strategy whitepaper.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the recording of this webinar is available only to those who registered for the webinar. However, there are some APOS on-demand webinars you may find useful: