The future of SAP Dashboards: codename ZEN

“It means choice and immediate value for both customer bases. Customers already employing SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius) will be able to deliver rich dashboards on mobile devices. While customers looking to create more complex and sophisticated user experiences will have that control within project Zen.

Moving forward, the intent is for these two to slowly merge together, bringing the richness, diverse data source support, and dynamic “what-if” capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to the Zen architecture; in addition to bringing the fine grained control and enhanced development experience to the dashboards world”

They also say that the new solution will be opened up to the partner eco-system for adding even more rich functionality. For the current product, SAP Dashboard Design, it has proven to be a very strong plus.

There is also a more detailed ‘Statement Of Direction’ document included which can be found here.

Features

I’m very curious where the difference in ‘fine grained control’ and ‘enhanced development experience’ lies, in relation to the current SAP Dashboard Design product. I think it will definitely be a web-based solution instead of the client solution SAP Dashboard Design is at the moment. With the evolving HTML5 features, this might bring very rich possibilities in which it is much easier to integrate dashboards in web applications and mobile apps.

Also features like write back, annotations, scheduled views and dashboard bursting are mentioned.

Write back can of course be very interesting for specific scenario’s. Especially if you look at it from a ‘action-based’ dashboard perspective. You see a error on the dashboard and want to take action by going to, for example, a SAP transaction to solve issues. Or update your forecast, based on gained insights by the dashboard.

Annotations has been a very long awaited feature. You want to be able to make annotations in your dashboard ‘snapshot’. You want to be able to explain why you were over-achieving or failing. You want your colleagues to be able to learn from your countermeasures so that they can benefit from your experiences. So your colleagues should be able to see what the effectiveness of your countermeasures were, by checking your annotations. Until now, making annotations hasn’t been properly supported so I’m very curious about how this will be implemented.

Personally, I also hope that printing features will be improved heavily, as well as a reduce in needed complexity to create interactive dashboards with drilldowns and filters. The MS Excel layer has provided a great piece of flexibility, but it also often costs to many time to build ‘simple’ drill down features between multiple objects.

Some other stuff like being more flexible to change data visualizations without needing to reconfigure the whole object from data binding, color properties etc would be very nice. We’ve seen in Webi and the BO Explorer that this is possible so I’ll keep my fingers crossed for this one.

Planning

The intent is that both technologies, and their content and applications, will resolve onto a common tool within a few releases, and with minimal disruption for the customers using them.

Phase 1 (roughly end of 2012)

• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards gains HTML5 output option to allow delivery to mobile devices.
• Zen’s initial release plans for HTML5 application development connected to SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver BW.
• Both tools plan to leverage the SAP BusinessObjects Mobile app to manage them locally on the device and provide a single point of entry.

Phase 2

• The HTML5 component library of  Zen is anticipated to expand to match current SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards offerings.
• Third party components support is planned for Zen so the large eco-system of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards can also start to reach out to new customers.
• We anticipate continuing to expand the range of charting and other visualization choices for designers, and include additional features like: Write Back, Annotations, Scheduled Views, Dashboard Bursting to name just a few.

Phase 3

• The plan is to unify the data access technologies allowing the new Zen runtime to access all types of data and converge the two design environments into one.