Embrace Dashboards on BusinessObjects Mobile BI 4.4 – ASUG Webcast

This was another ASUG webcast given by SAP’s Viswanathan Ramakrishnan and Karsten Ruf.  They focused on a few products – this blog covers BI4 Dashboard, features that are coming with Mobile BI 4.4 / BI4 SP05 (not released yet).  Of course the usual disclaimer applies that things are subject to change.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Mobile BI 4.4 will support additional content types, Dashboards, Design Studio, Interactive Crystal Reports (when connected online)

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Figure 2 shows that Mobile BI 4.4 will allow access Dashboards content – offline access and refresh on device – to be accessible you have to use Dashboard Designer

However, not all features are available for Mobile

Compatibility panel will list components and features not available.  It will support most of components

SAP advises creating dashboards from scratch due to feature compatibility and form factor difference

It supports query panel to BW, HANA, and third party relational

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 lists the supported components/charts and connection

Column chart and bar charts are support

Connectivity is via the query panel

Figure 4 shows gaps between Flash and PC version in Dashboards for Mobile

Given these gaps, the migration may be difficult.

Add-on  components are not supported in this release

It will not support maps

By default, only Nova theme is supported in this release, so you may want to switch themes in existing dashboard

For deployment, it is dependent on the BI platform.  You have to publish dashboards to BI4 mobile platform – unlike PC flash version

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Figure 5 shows recommendations for dashboard design for Mobile.  Mobile device users have short attention span, so they recommend exposing a small set of KPI’s (key performance indicators) to the end user.  KPIs should be in large fonts.

SAP recommends building new dashboards instead of existing ones

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Figure 6 shows how to publish dashboards to iPad

Next blog will cover Design Studio.