Late today (2/10/2013) SP12 of SAP Lumira became available for download.  I have been expectantly awaiting this release to look closer at the new “Compose” feature to build interactive storyboards as the area of Data Visualisation and in particular Dashboard Design interests me greatly and I often speak publicly on this topic and example is “What is a dashboard really” http://thinkingbi.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/what-is-a-dashboard-really/

I’ll start with my observations and then walk through what I did….

Conclusion ..  

I think storyboards are a great enhancement to Lumira the same way the Exploration Views enhance the use of Explorer.  There is still work to be done on sharing the storyboards to other people as both static and interactive applications but what a great step forward for Lumira.  The public facing roadmap suggests you will be able to house, secure and access SAP Lumira visualisation from within the SAP Business Objects Platform (BI Launchpad), think of the possibilities this offers and how end users can engage, interact and gain insight from information assets.

One more thing …   The new HTML5 UI is a bold move in my opinion, not that it’s the wrong choice of technology, but it really changes the UI experience for a user from the earlier versions.  The workflow has changed on many of the everyday activities, not un-intuitively, but it certainly made me stop and think a few times. An example is the semantic enrichment of data is not as obvious, and creating geographic hierarchies feels different but get’s the same results in the end.

I defiantely need to play more with SP12 as with only an hour so far it honestly feels very new in the UI and Workflow but the future possibilities are encouraging.

How to:

Data Acquired

Visualisations built

Remember to click on + to get a blank before you save, otherwise you’ll overwrite the previously saved image.

Compose

The end result