Scheduling Excel Reports with Advanced Analysis and BOEnterprise Server

[Former Member]

In my first blog I gave you a first impression with Advanced Analytics, Microsoft Office Edition. You can read my blog here.

The most significant change of Advanced Analysis to Business Explorer Analyzer is that your workbooks will no longer be stored in the BW and the Docuemnt store, but on the BO Server. You may ask why that? Why can’t I save my workbooks on the BW Server any longer. Here I can schedule them and broadcast to my recipients.

I will tell you the good news: BO Enterprise server has scheduling options for different kind of reports. It’s very easy to use and to send or broadcast your reports to your recipients. I used ther BI Broadcaster for reports, but in most cases it was very slow and not very comfortable to use.  Now I want to show you how you can use Advanced Analytics and BO Enterprise Server to schedule your Dashboards and or reports and send it on a regular basis to your recipients. If you want to do that you have to follow 7 easy steps:

1.) Create your dashboard with Advanced Analytics

Here you see a screenshot of a possible Dashboard created with Advanced Analytics.

  

2.)Save your workbook on BOE server in a folder.

Just press “Save workbbok” button in Advanced Analysis, connect to BO server if you are not yet connected and chose folder, where you want to save your workbook. The dashboard will be saved as an XLS file. If you have done that, any user with read authoriziation on this folder can now access your dashboard over Infoview for example and you have done a simple way to access your dashboard over the web. You don’t have to save it in the portal or create any iview to open it.

3.) Logon to the BOE Server and go to the folder

You can now check your dashboard, if it looks still the same.

4.)Publish your dashboard

On your BO Enterprise Server you can now publish your dashboard. What you below is BO Infoview with it's folder structure and with your saved workbook in the folder. With context menu you can create a new publication.

 

A new publication is created on the server. This publication can be scheduled and send to recipients.

5.)Schedule the file with BO Scheduler.

You can schedule your publication e.g. daily and send it per email or just send it to the BO inbox of your users. Go to your recently created publication and schedule it via context menu.

That’s cool! You are not restricted when you want to send your report. If you have asked how to broadcast a report on every third Thursday in the month, with BO Enterprise server you can  do it.

Now switch to “enterprise recipients”.

Here you can choose all recipients, you want to send your report. In the list you will find all BO users. With the option “Dynamic recipients” you can send your report to any email address you enter. The last step is to define the targets.

You can zip your report, redefine the name and send it as copy or link. What do you want more?

If you decide to send your report by email, the window changes and you have some other options:

If you have done that configuration , you finally press the “Schedule” button. Of course you can easily switch between the steps and make changes!

6.) Execute and control the schedule protocol for possible errors

Now the scheduler will execute your publication. You can check log for possible errors.

If everything went fine, your recipient will receive your report in his inbox.

7.) Recipients will receive the file.

After execution of the scheduler, the recipients will receive your mail and can open it.

That’s pretty simple and very easy. For me it is a very interesting alternative for existing Broadcaster schedules of Workbbooks and more. The only pity is that the current version of Advanced Analysis can not migrate existing BEx workbooks. This is a feature for the next release. I will stay tuned.