Business Objects Tutorial - SAP BO

This tutorial gives you an overview and talks about the fundamentals of SAP Business Objects.

SAP Business Objects Tutorial - What Is BO And Its Overview

SAP BusinessObjects BI Portfolio

As you can see below Figure the SAP BusinessObjects BI portfolio consists of three main categories:
Discovery and Analysis.
Dashboards and Apps.
Reporting

The category Discovery and Analysis is about providing your business users the tools which they need to leverage the information, analyze the data, finding outliers and trends, and use from simple to advanced data visualizations.

The following are the products that are in the category Discovery and Analysis (below Figure)

Visual Intelligence
Explorer
Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office and Analysis, edition for OLAP
Predictive Analysis

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Discovery and Analysis

Discovery and Analysis

You can also recognize, based on the actual products in this category that this category provides you with products that allow your business users to use the corporate data and build their own analytical content, as all of the products in this category are designed for a business user without always having to rely on the IT department.
In the second category — Dashboards and Apps (see Below Figure) – the SAP BusinessObjects BI portfolio provides you with products that allow your TT department to create from simple dashboards to complex RI driven applications.

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In the category Dashboards and Apps you have two products:

• SAP Business Objects Design Studio.
• SAP Business Objects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius).

Dashboards and Apps Build Engaging Experiences

Dashboards and Applications

In this category, it is about creating interactive data visualization and sharing the information from your corporate data warehouse by using interactive controls and compelling data visualizations. The products in this category — SAP Business Objects Design Studio and SAP Business Objects Dashboards — are targeted towards an IT audience, but the content created by your IT department will be consumed by a far larger audience.

Reporting  –  Share Information

In the last category — Reporting (Above Figure) — you will find Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence.
In this category it is about the classic reporting tools, allowing you, on the one hand, to create operational, layout focused reports using Crystal Reports and on the other hand to provide your business users with a reporting environment that allows them to edit and create reports based on a common set of well-defined meta-data. With Crystal Reports, you have a BI client used by your IT department and the content is — like with products in the category Dashboards and Apps — consumed by a larger audience. In the category reporting, you also have Web Intelligence, which allows you to provide your business users a self-service-driven reporting environment, so that your users are able to create and change their own reports.
Let’s take a closer look at which role SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP plays in our overall SAP landscape.

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SAP Business Objects Analysis Suite

In the SAP Business Objects Analysis Suite you have:

• SAP Business Objects Design Studio.
• SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for OLAP.
• SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office.
  
  SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for OLAP is being positioned as an ad-hoc OLAP client for a business analyst. In this context ad-hoc means that the business user does not have to rely on the IT department to create the workspaces or to prepare the content, but instead the business user can use SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for OLAP to create new content or change existing content and share the findings with other users.

SAP Business Objects Analysis

In the figure above we can see further details about SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP. SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for OLAP is the premium alternative for your current Business Explorer (BEx) Web Analyzer and allows you to provide your business analyst with a web-based environment for analyzing your corporate data.
When it comes to SAP NetWeaver BW, SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for OLAP is able to leverage your existing investment in Business Explorer (BEx) queries and Info Provider. We will discuss the details on how SAP Business Objects Analysis, edition for OLAP integrates with SAP NetWeaver BW in Business Objects Training.

Related Article: Analysis Edition for OLAP

SAP Business Objects Design Studio

SAP Business Objects Design Studio (see above Figure) is the premium alternative for the SAP Web Application Designer and allows your IT department centrally to create RI dashboards and RI applications. SAP Business Objects Design Studio is part of the SAP Business Objects Analysis Suite and completes the offering giving you three products for your different sets of requirements and user audiences.
As shown the below Figure you can see that some of the RI clients in the SAP Business Objects RI portfolio are designed for a business user audience and some of them are designed for IT to create the initial content. This distinction between the business user and the IT department being the main target group for creating the content is very important to understand.

Who creates the content?

The image above shows that SAP BusinessObjects Analysis — which includes SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office and SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP — is designed for the business user without having to rely on your IT department to be part of the process to create content. This does not mean that you cannot use the IT department as part of the content creation process, in fact, we have seen several customers creating workspaces with SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP in a central IT team, and here the team is creating corporate standard workspaces for a larger audience, but your users do not always have to rely on the IT department.
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP is designed as an ad-hoc, self-service multi-dimensional client allowing your business users to access the corporate data, analyze the information, and share their findings.

Who consumes the content?

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