SAP Solutions for Small Businesses and Midsize Companies
What’s New in SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge BI
Business Intelligence Software for Midsize Companies
What’s New in SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge BI
Table of Contents
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SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge Business Intelligence
What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI
Guiding Principles Behind SAP BusinessObjects
Edge BI
Key Benefits
Innovations for a Better User Experience
Powerful BI Anytime, Anywhere
Other Improvements
Empowering People to Achieve Remarkable Results
For More Information
Robust Functionality for Midsize Companies
SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge Business Intelligence
Midsize companies like yours need business
intelligence (BI) solutions that are both powerful and affordable. The latest release of SAP®
BusinessObjects™ Edge BI software, built on
the same technology foundation as the SAP
BusinessObjects BI platform, provides new
levels of refined, intuitive functionality for
all your business users – and real-world
deployment flexibility at an accessible price.
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI is designed and packaged to serve
as a powerful intelligence platform for heterogeneous environments in midsize companies – a platform that will meet your
requirements today and support your growth in the future. The
software is available in three versions:
•• Standard package
•• With data integration
•• With data management
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI enables growing companies
to be more nimble and stay ahead of the competition by
providing self-service access to relevant information for
accurate, timely decision making.
Open Solution with Innovative Features
What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI connects your business users by
removing boundaries for sharing information. Its innovative
functionality supports all types of business users – analysts,
casual users, managers, and executives – and transcends company walls to extend to customers and partners.
The software helps your company deliver an interactive user
experience that brings business users together. It offers intuitive
features that help simplify the way business users make timely,
informed decisions in the context of their roles and their contributions to overall company goals. It provides powerful functionality for operational reporting, flexible ad hoc query and analysis,
dashboards and visualization, and supporting data quality and
data management. And because SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI
is open, it works within nearly any organization’s environment –
whether you’re currently using software from SAP, Oracle
Corporation, or Microsoft Corporation.
Guiding Principles Behind SAP BusinessObjects
Edge BI
At SAP, we build every product release and version around
guiding principles that are based on key customer and market
requirements. The guiding principles for SAP BusinessObjects
Edge BI are:
•• Make BI accessible, actionable, and personal based on the
way people use it, while offering a full-spectrum solution that
addresses their BI needs
•• Deliver innovative functionality to help improve productivity
across an organization
•• Strive for simplicity for all types of users, to help drive more BI
adoption and improve organization-wide decision-making
processes
Key Benefits
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software provides:
•• A comprehensive BI solution that connects business users at
any level with all the information they need and enables them
to share information within the context of their activities
•• An interactive user interface that helps business users get the
information they want in the way they want it, when they want
it – across system boundaries
•• A data foundation that helps ensure that decisions are based
on trustworthy information, no matter where the source of the
data resides
What’s New in SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge BI
Innovations for a Better User Experience
A major theme across our entire BI portfolio is the unified user
experience. Our goal is to deliver a seamless look and feel for
users across the different components of the software package.
This eases the transition from one BI tool to another, enabling a
more productive experience with less time spent navigating
menus. Working with different tools within the software package,
users will discover a new and very sophisticated charting experience. We have taken the powerful charting functionality of the
search and exploration tool and extended it (with many more
graphic choices) to the reporting and ad hoc query and analysis
functionality.
Enhanced Semantic Layer for Easier Access to Information
Our vision is to give users more autonomy by exposing data in
plain business terms with a new and significantly enhanced
semantic layer (or universe) – and we deliver. In this release, the
semantic layer supports SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI across
all data types, including true multidimensional sources, while
reusing existing hierarchies, key figures, and metadata. With the
new semantic layer, users can also take advantage of universes
based on two or more sources and get relevant perspectives
never possible before.
Personalized, Self-Service Access via the BI Launch Pad
The BI launch pad (previously known as InfoView) now provides
a single space for users within your business network to find all
your organization’s BI content that is appropriate to their role. As
the access point to existing corporate information, the BI launch
pad presents information in an efficient and visually attractive
way and saves business users from manually sifting through
irrelevant information.
Features include:
•• Filters and advanced search options to help users quickly find
the right information
•• Multiple tabs that allow work on different documents
simultaneously
•• Alerts that enable faster responses to changing business
conditions
•• Optimized workflow functionality to schedule and distribute
information to relevant people
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To increase user efficiency, the BI launch pad home page by
default is divided into five areas:
•• My Recently Viewed Documents – With this viewing history,
users can quickly return to previously viewed documents.
•• Unread Messages in My Inbox – This helps ensure users don’t
miss any unread reports in their in-box.
•• My Recently Run Documents – When users log in in the morning, they can see the reports that ran the night before.
•• Alerts – This shows any real-time operational alerts that were
generated by the BI platform.
•• My Applications – Users see an oversized icon list of their
available applications, ready for quick access.
Report designers have their work made easier with a new user
interface that includes a ribbon-bar look and feel, a new query
design panel, and more efficient workflows – all delivering a
superior report authoring experience.
Unified View of Information Within the BI Workspace
The BI workspace is browser-based functionality that delivers a
richer, more intuitive experience for finding, organizing, and
working with BI content. The workspace makes it easier to unify
the information that your business users need for their daily
activities. It eliminates their need to access multiple applications
by bringing relevant information into a central location. The BI
workspace displays content from SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions and also other content types, such as external Web pages,
Microsoft Office documents, and Adobe PDF documents.
Multilingual support for the reporting functionality within SAP
BusinessObjects Edge BI gives your users global reach. In the
new release, text objects, report prompts, tool tips, and so on
can be translated and localized. Report authors can create one
report and schedule it in multiple languages for delivery to users
in multiple regions, thus reducing report deployment costs and
enabling a greater number of people to access and share trusted
information.
Powerful BI Anytime, Anywhere
New functionality for enhanced mobility, reporting, ad hoc query
and analysis, and dashboards makes SAP BusinessObjects Edge
BI more powerful than ever.
Mobility
SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software now offers the same sophisticated charting experience found in the rest of our BI solutions, so mobile users can access key performance indicators
and visualizations wherever they are. It’s easier for users to take
action (via a phone call, e-mail, or text) and be more productive
– common activities such as sending documents are only one
click away. And with its enhanced support of mobile devices and
technologies (such as Wi-Fi) and simplified configuration, the
software is even easier to deploy across the enterprise.
Reporting
In this new release, you will find several productivity improvements in reporting functionality: a new designer interface,
support for our new semantic layer across all data sources,
and multilingual support.
By leveraging the new semantic layer, reporting becomes easier,
and users gain a more consistent query design experience
across all data sources, based on the same metadata model
used by SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions. Drawing on our new
semantic layer, the reporting functionality enables broader reuse
of existing hierarchies, key figures, and metadata – saving users
time and effort.
Ad Hoc Query and Analysis
Your users will benefit from tremendous improvements in this
new release to the functionality for ad hoc query and analysis:
user experience and interactivity, data navigation, and interoperability. The software features a modern user interface where
toolbars are organized by function, and frequently used functions are only one click away for better, more natural workflows.
Business users and analysts will also benefit from a new charting experience (including many new charts), in addition to the
fine-grained chart control they are used to. And the new release
delivers better data navigation by allowing on-the-fly browsing of
data providers, objects, and data. Quick result validation, combined with new sorting and filtering functions, helps analysts and
advanced users understand the data behind reports and
analyses.
Dashboards
Authors creating dashboards and visualizations in SAP
BusinessObjects Edge BI will appreciate the significantly
enhanced functionality in the new release. Thanks to native support for the new semantic layer, dashboards share a common
interface for all data sources, enabling improved and integrated
query design. For the first time, authors can design dashboards
and supporting queries without having to leave their authoring
environment. A simplified design experience also eliminates
Microsoft Excel work required in previous releases.
Other Improvements
Among the many improvements in SAP BusinessObjects Edge
BI are new functionality for text analysis, event insight, and monitoring and auditing.
Text Analysis
Text analysis functionality is included in the versions of SAP
BusinessObjects Edge BI with data integration and with data
management. It can help you unlock insights hidden in unstructured text sources such as blogs, Web sites, e-mails, support
logs, research, and surveys, so you can analyze people’s
thoughts and feelings on your business, products, and services.
These new insights can enable competitive differentiation by
allowing you to measure and understand exactly where your
company stands with customers and noncustomers, how you
compare to the competition, where you can make improvements, and what new innovations or opportunities you can
leverage for continued growth.
With this functionality, you can:
•• Extract, categorize, and summarize key information from
unstructured text and convert it to a structured format so
that it can be an effective data source for data integration or
business intelligence
•• Tap into customer sentiments, market trends, industry buzz,
and product and service issues so you can support corporate
initiatives such as voice of the customer, root cause analysis,
win/loss analysis, employee satisfaction, competitive intelligence, and customer retention
•• Deploy fast, accurate, and flexible text analysis to support
evolving data needs and provide a summarized, 360-degree
view of volumes of data that would previously have been
overwhelming
•• Extend SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI to access and analyze
information previously hidden in text – and surface the results
through familiar BI tools such as SAP BusinessObjects Web
Intelligence® software, SAP Crystal Reports® software, and
dashboards
•• Process unstructured text in more than 30 languages
•• Reduce the need for and costs of manual research and outsourcing for unstructured data analysis
What’s New in SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge BI
Event Insight Available As an Add-On
Event insight functionality is offered as an add-on to SAP
BusinessObjects Edge BI. On any given day, thousands of business activities are happening around you. Customers buy and
return products. Warehouses and stores receive goods. How do
you know when something isn’t happening as planned? With
event insight functionality, you can understand the impact of
events within your operations in real time, so you can take
appropriate action.
Monitoring and Auditing
For improving activity, compliance, system performance, and
usage analysis as well as monitoring the different BI solutions,
this release includes new monitoring and auditing functionality.
A new monitoring dashboard provides insight into the health and
performance of the entire BI landscape and can trigger notifications when thresholds are met. You can also monitor the BI
platform and perform root cause analysis via the SAP Solution
Manager application management solution. A completely overhauled auditing function for compliance and usage analysis is
available to provide visibility on how your people use the existing
BI deployment. Finally, if you already use the change and transport system tool for the application lifecycle, you can now use
this for BI content lifecycle management across different
landscapes.
Empowering People to Achieve Remarkable
Results
With the latest release of SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, you and
your business network gain insight into business operations at
every level of your organization. Empower all individuals to transform their decision making by creating and assembling decisionready information. Accelerate collaborative decisions by bringing
together the right people, tools, and standards. Achieve remarkable results by maximizing business performance with effective
use of information, enabling the best performance from all –
employees, partners, and your entire business network.
For More Information
To learn more about how SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI can deliver the advantages of a powerful BI platform to your midsize company, contact your SAP representative or visit us on the Web at
www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/sme/edgeseries.
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