Bridging the gap between the structured application world and the unstructured collaboration world generally allow you to improve team productivity, streamline decision making as well as monitor and advance processes while on the go. SAP Jam delivers social collaboration across the entire business network. It offers a company-wide solution for employees, partners and customers to handle business-specific problems and scenarios where collaboration can significantly improve those processes. New to SAP BI 4.1 is the integration with SAP Jam, which allows you to bring business context to reports and dashboards, while providing collaboration that is supported by data which exists inside SAP BI platform. You can select key reports to follow, track comments, and discussions related to a followed report and participate in a discussion for any report as well as share hypotheses or findings with others.
In this blog I like to give an overview of this collaboration integration. Let me start with pointing out that unless the administrator has set up the collaboration integration, none of the features will be visible for the end users. Information on how to set up the integration can e found in my previous blog post (
What administrators need to know about SAP BI 4.1. and SAP Jam integration)
Once the collaboration has been enabled, the BI launch pad users will see a “Collaboration” column in their document listing page. This column will indicate whether a particular document contains a discussion and whether the user is currently following it.
The table below describes the meaning of the different symbols.
| Icon |
Description |
 |
Comments are posted for this document or its instances. |
 |
No comments are posted for this document or its instances. |
  |
You are following the feed for this document or instance. |
Using the arrow symbol (
) to the right of the screen allows you to open the details panel. The Collaboration tab in the details panel will show the discussion about the selected document. From within the collaboration tab you can post your comments and change your follow/unfollow status.
The same arrow symbol is available when viewing the report in a BI launch pad tab or even an OpenDocument link, allowing you to collaborate with others directly while viewing report instances.
Any new comment made on a report that you are following will be aggregated to your SAP Jam feed, ensuring that you do not miss any of the important information. You can also respond back right from within your SAP Jam feed without having to navigate back into BI launch pad.
If you are follow a template report via the document listing page, then you are automatically follow all instances even for recurrence that are schedule in the future. You can follow or unfollow individual instance via the history page.
Also if your report contains multiple instances, then you can easily view and participate in discussions from different instances without having to open the report. In the Document listing page on the side panel there’s a drop down, you can use it to view discussions from instances by selecting the instance from the dropdown list.
With the features mentioned above BI 4.1 with SAP JAM enables your organization to make better business decisions by leveraging your BI assets along with your other Enterprise information sources.
hello Christina, thank you for this interesting article. I do have one question though. Users may want to make commentary or discussion variable, e.g. a certain report can be run for different country by different users, depending on their authorisation. Can the commentary be made variable, i.e. dependent on parameters / selection options related to the report so that running the report for country A shows a different dicussion as for country B... or in other words how does the security aspect tie into Collaboration?
Best regards,
Stefaan.
Hi,
all comment for each document/instance is visible for everyone who has view right to the document/instance AND view comment right.
You can use publication functionality to schedule personized instances for users, then you would have an instance for each country and comments then can be seperated. An overview of publication can be found at Introduction into the SAP BusinessObject Intelligence Platform Publication
Best Regards,
Christina
Hi,
I have moved to new responsibilities within SAP a year ago. I am blocking new comments to this thread, please post questions to the BI Platform forum to allow the community to help further.
Thanks,
Christina