Limits on mobile SAP Dashboard data volumes and how to avoid them
Would you like great performance, off-line capability and 50 times more data in your mobile SAP Dashboards ?
Last week Sarah Gou from the SAP Dashboards product team posted an article on mobile best practices for SAP Dashboards. It is a good read with a number of pieces of excellent advice for deploying successful mobile dashboards.
Indeed, on his blog Ryan Goodman (@rmgoodm, CEO at Centigon Solutions) rated it a “must read article” if you are looking to deploy SAP Dashboards on mobile devices.
Having said that, the article also highlights an issue concerning data volumes.
The advice is to limit your dashboards to “no more than 4000 embedded cells” of data. Which, if you take a typical 10 values per row, equates to a data source of only 400 rows.
Now, this is probably enough to support an at-a-glance, overview dashboard, but as I have written about here many times before this is not really what end users are looking for. Rather, end-users want a dashboard which gives them the overview but also provides the ability to dig into the data to get to the heart of the matter.
In a traditional desktop delivered dashboard this can be overcome by fetching new data on demand (although this comes at the expense of significantly increasing the complexity and therefore the cost of dashboard development). However, fetching new data on demand exposes two issues which are key in the mobile world:
- Poor networks
- Off-line access
We all know that mobile networks are far from consistently fast and sometimes unavailable altogether. In both cases, the refresh-as-you-go approach is at best highly frustrating and at worst unusable.
Fortunately, help is at hand. Antivia’s XWIS Advantage (http://www.antivia.com/xwis-advantage.php) is a certified extension to SAP Dashboards which overcomes these issue by allowing dashboards to embed datasets which give quick load times, consistently good click-to-click performance and full off-line capability.
You can see this in action at the links below to the SAP Analytics and Antivia You Tube channels – here you can see XWIS Advantage powered mobile SAP Dashboards delivering great performance on between 25x and 40x the data volumes recommended as a maximum by SAP for the vanilla product
Mobile dashboard with 10,000 rows / 100,000 cells (SAP Analytics channel)
Mobile dashboard with 15,000 rows / 170,000 cells (Antivia channel)