Tired of following instructions from the User Guides? Trying to find an old video on Xcelsius? MyXcelsius.com has a solution. They recently launched Xcelsius Videos page which has all the Xcelsius Videos that you can find on the web. They all are captured on high resolution and can be viewed on any browser.
The InfoBurst team at InfoSol is relocating their Infoburst2009 site to a new web address. Visit the new product blog at infosolblog.com/infoburst
Yolande Grill is the Vice President of Business Development at InfoSol Inc. I would like to think of myself as the Chief Transformation Officer. My favorite quote to ponder is one from Trina Paulus. "How Exactly does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so badly, that you are willing to give up being a catterpillar" When you connect an OpenDocument statement to a URL button in Xcelsius and you apply the option New Window in the button properties, a new window is opened to show your WebI report (or Crystal report for that matter). However the report is not actually opened in that window, it is opened in your dashboard window, thus after closing or going back it forces the dashboard to reload again.
Solution:
add the following commands to the opendocument url:
sWindow=New&isApplication=true
the first command forces the link to open in a new window, the second command keeps your dashboard in the state it is in.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.More and more, dashboards are playing an increasingly pivotal role in organizations with a growing demand for new ways of delivering and consuming these dashboards. Users are no longer content with having dashboards delivered via a corporate portal or BusinessObjects InfoView. In fact, to use a rather overused BI cliché, users are demanding dashboards that deliver “the right information, at the right time, in the right place”.
This means, that organizations are now looking at ways to make dashboards available offline, delivered by email, or accessible on their users’ mobile devices. They also want to focus the information within the dashboards so that it can be personalized and distributed to users in a simple file format. However, many organizations have concerns about data security, encryption and scalability, and also the work required to customize dashboards. These concerns have prevented them from pursuing what could be a very effective way to extend the use of business intelligence to new users.
Antivia will be hosting a webinar on Thursday, November 18 at 2:00pm EST, demonstrating how you can utilize the power of XWIS and the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform to distribute personalized, offline Xcelsius dashboards, in a secure and scalable way to new users and new devices.
You can register for the webinar here. Space is limited so register today.
For those of you who missed the previous webinar: “Accelerate your Xcelsius Dashboards”, the recording is now available here.
Soo Tang Yuk fosters and evangelizes the ‘Xcelsius Gurus Network” and its communities. To find out more about her, please visit the About Us page. (posted on behalf of Andrew Smith, VP of Antivia, North America)
Tags: Antivia, Business Objects, BusinessObjects, Xcelsius 2008, Xcelsius Webinars
Par for the course really. How often do you get told the deadline is tight and cannot be shifted as the media slot has been booked?
When I was told I had 2 weeks to develop the Careers24.com Salary Survey Results Dashboard I thought to myself, “no problem”. The stats guy had 4 weeks to do his thing and I needed to supply him with my data requirements.
Salary Survey 2008The client contact person came from a project management background and as such she nearly exploded when the data guy came with one excuse after the other for being late. First the data quality was bad because they added the dreaded “Other” field to the survey. This caused most participants to just type in their jobs instead of looking for them on the list. So he had to manually go through 20,000+ records to fix this.
That wasn’t the end of it, his second excuse for not being on time was that his computer was hit by lightning. This meant that while I could do the foundation work on the dashboard I couldn’t integrate the data. We were not sure if he could deliver the aggregated data in the format I required.
So instead of having 2 weeks to develop the dashboard I had 1. Just 1 week to design, populate and test. There was no turning back, I had to deliver and deliver I did.
Squeezing 2 weeks into 1, working round the clock. I had to use Skype and email to communicate. PowerPoint slides with screenshots and annotations were sent back and forth, long hours on the phone and then, right as the client was about to crack I pulled through. The dashboard was finished.
I delivered in 1 week what the previous year’s flash developer took 3 months to do. The client didn’t believe me at the start that Xcelsius could deliver on my promises but it did. I had saved the day and the launch party was a blast.
Using Xcelsius 2008 I could deliver all but one of their requests, I could not display values above the bars of the charts. Now as of SP3 I can 
If you think you can’t, you usually can.
Time can slow down given enough Redbull.
Being a report developer can be quite exciting.
Pressure can turn a lump of coal into a diamond.
The following is a list to our upcoming webinars… Follow the link next to the webinar date to register.
InfoBurst Webinars
November 5 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/EZpQ
November 8 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/036g
November 10 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/8ewE
November 12 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/6yYs
November 15 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/vhW2
360 View Webinars
November 4 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/hCj7
November 9 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/CdRc
On facebook, follow InfoBurst at www.facebook.com/infoburst
Yolande Grill is the Vice President of Business Development at InfoSol Inc. I would like to think of myself as the Chief Transformation Officer. My favorite quote to ponder is one from Trina Paulus. "How Exactly does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so badly, that you are willing to give up being a catterpillar" As usual, before getting started I want to provide a quick recap of where we are with the Reportapalooza competition. This is the last week of voting before the final winner is announced on Nov 22th!
Challenge #1 (Done) – Winner , Mico Yuk (Check out my Coffee Consumption Calculator)Challenge #2 (Done) – Winner, Mico Yuk (based on traffic sent to Report a Hero Page)Challenge #3 (Done) – Winner, Brian Durning (voted best Crystal Reports Video by Community)Challenge #4 (Done) – Winner, David Deitch (voted best Charity Dashboard by Community)Challenge #5 (In Progress) – What this series of blog post is about.Community Dashboard Challenge (In Progress) – Vote until Nov 12th, 2010 for your favorite community dashboard.In Part 1 of this series I went over some Q&A on what it would take to embed your Xcelsius visualization (in this case a map) into your Crystal Report, as well as some pros and cons. In Part 2 I am going to cover how to set up your map in Xcelsius so that it can be consumed by Crystal Reports. For this example we will be using Google Maps (compliments of Centigon Solutions) as it much more robust than the out of box maps in Xcelsius.
1. Install Google Maps Plug-in for Xcelsius (more details on how to do this here)
2. Add the GMaps Plugin to your Xcelsius dashboard
3. Configure your Excel spreadsheet to hold 2 columns of data for the Google Map: 1) Map Address 2) Map Labels
4. Go to Data Connections in Xcelsius -> Add the ‘Crystal Reports Data Consumer’ Connection
5. Configure the ‘Crystal Reports Data Consumer’ Connection so that the ‘Row Headers’ are bound to the Excel cell area you created in Step #3
In Part 3 I will focus on the final step: Bringing your Xcelsius Map into Crystal Reports.
One last thing, please don’t forget to cast your votes on the 3 dashboards that were submitted by the community to show your support.
Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.
Tags: Business Objects, BusinessObjects, Centigon Solutions, Reportapalooza, SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, Xcelsius 2008, Xcelsius 2008 Tips
