Posts tagged Online

There has been quite some fuzz after a previous blog post of me in my mail, twitter account and also Ryan Goodman dedicated a little blog to the subject. Reason enough for me to dedicate some extra lines to it. First I’d like to answer the question of the challenge “Is Adobe Wallaby able to convert Xcelsius SWF files into HTML5?” At the moment, without a doubt, it’s not possible to use Adobe Wallaby to convert Xcelsius files into the HTML5 format. The main reason is that the ActionScript code which is used in the Xcelsius SWF files, cannot be converted into JavaScript powered HTML by Adobe Wallaby. As I mentioned before, this was a “lab” test to play around with new arising technology, which might make it possible to easily convert Xcelsius SWF files into HTML5. Advantages would be that the dashboards could run platform independable, as long as the browser supports HTML5, which won’t take long any more.

In the meanwhile, there are some nice alternatives for Xcelsius in the SAP portfolio / eco-system if you’re looking for a mobile dashboarding solution that works seamless on Apple devices. At the moment, I think RoamBI is the best 3rd party alternative in terms of usability, user experience, integration with SAP back-ends, short development time, etcetera.

In the meanwhile, you also see that SAP is investing heavily in the Apple devices. One of the examples is the interview with SAP CIO Oliver Bussman which is a real interesting article. SAP is aware, without a doubt, of the potential impact of Apple products for businesses. That’s just one of the reasons why they deployed 3,500 iPads in less then one year within SAP. With the upcoming release of BI4, not only the SAP BO explorer, but also WebIntelligence will be iPad enabled. These kind of product development choices aren’t made while making your peanut-butter sandwich in the morning before going to work. SAP has a clear mobile strategy for the future which gets empowered even more after the acquisition of Sybase.

So back to one of Ryan’s questions: “Does SAP need to completely change a highly successful dashboard design platform to serve one single device even it is not the best possible approach to dashboards oniOS? ”

My answer, no they don’t. Xcelsius will continue to be the number one dashboarding application within the SAP portfolio for the desktop users. That’s for sure without a doubt. I specifically say “within the SAP portfolio” since Xcelsius (SAP BO Dashboards arrrrgh) isn’t the holy grail. It takes quite some development time before you have a pixel perfect solution and it’s visualizations aren’t always as flexible as you’d hope they’d be. Especially User Experience designers who can make real, real, real, real (you get it?) awesome designs of dashboards without tool limitations in mind, often walk up the Xcelsius wall. Don’t understand me wrong, I’m a great “fan” of Xcelsius, but also Xcelsius has it’s limitations.

If you take a look at BO Exploration Views it comes very close to dashboarding functionality like Xcelsius, and this app is optimized for mobile devices. I dedicated a blog to it earlier and explained some differences and overlap between BO Exploration Views and for example Xcelsius. It’s just an example of SAP focussing on mobile and online platforms for the future with a stronger focus on information consuming than on information designing.

Another important thing is that ”porting” a dashboard from Xcelsius to a mobile app with exactly the same design, layout etcetera is a bad thing in the first place. The presentation of the information must be optimized for the platform and device your consuming it on. Looking at a dashboard on your 17″ monitor which receives input from a mouse and keyboard is completely different than a dashboard that is used on a mobile device like a phone or tablet which gets it’s input from a finger. User Experience wise, porting a dashboard 1-on-1 from desktop to mobile is a bad idea from the beginning. Ryan mentions a solution by Antivia which is being developed to port dashboards to flash enabled devices. This is a good thing, as long as the developers have designed the Xcelsius dashboard with this purpose in mind from the beginning. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a dashboard that looks stunning, but with the touch of your finger, 10 filters will be activated instead of just 1 which was supposed to be activated. Great potential, as long as UX is embedded in the dashboard developers mind. I’d love to play around with a prototype of this tool so if Antivia is willing to give me a test version, give me a sign! I think Antivia is a great 3rd party developer for Xcelsius solutions so I’m convinced they’ll release a nice solution. But beware, it’s not about technology, but about people.

SAP understands this quite well as you can see in the differences in the desktop version of the SAP BO explorer and the iPhone app. The information that is presented is exactly the same, but the way you interact with it, based on UI buttons etcetera is different. As an example, I’ve added two screenshots.

Well I hope this gives a better view of my vision on mobile devices and how you should publish and present BI content on them. SAP is investing in it without a doubt and they are making great steps forward. In the meanwhile, tools like RoamBI are great alternatives and I’m quite curious about their own strategy and future releases and how they’ll manage to integrate with upcoming SAP solutions in the BI4 platform. Time will tell.

Enough for now. Feel free to share your thoughts trough the comments, mail, twitter, etcetera. You’ll know how and where to find me.