"Publishing" is the process of making documents viz., Web Intelligence documents, and Desktop Intelligence documents publicly available for mass consumption for targeted users. The contents of these documents can be personailsed and distributed automatically via email, FTP or saved to disk.
The scope of publication can be extended and managed through the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform for web viewing, archiving, and retrieval, and automated through the use of scheduling.
Publication can be done either from CMC or Launch Pad and the documents can be tailored for different users or recipients. The publication created can be scheduled to run at specified intervals; and send it to a number of destinations, including recipients' Business Objects inboxes and email addresses.
The below steps explain the process and concepts involved in creating a New Publication through Business Objects BO 4.0 Launch pad:
Requirement :
Create a publication that sends the contract information to specific users in a BO enterprise on monthly
basis in xls format.
Login to Business Objects Launch pad
- Go to Documents --> Publication
CMC:
Folders-->Manage-->New Publication
The details of the publication are provided in general information.
Source documents are the list of documents to be published to the intended users.
The document that contains the contract information for the previous year is added to the source documents in this publication.
Enterprise Recipients:
The list of users who are intended to subscribe these documents are added to the recipient list. The users have to be present in the Business Objects user enterprise to be added.
User groups can also be added on a condition that the intented group to be added is already created in the CMC.
The user is added from the list.
Dynamic recipients:
Lets imagine a situation in which the Retail conglomerate, Pepsi distributes invoices to agents who are not in the Business Objects Enterprise system. Consider that the agents information already exists in an external database.
The publisher creates a document based on this external database and uses the document as a dynamic source. The agents receive the latest update, in this case , invoices through this publication on a timely basis.
Personalization:
"Personalization" is the process of filtering source data from the documents so that only relevant data is displayed for publication recipients. Personalization alters the view of the data, but it does not necessarily change or secure the data being queried from the data source.
Let us consider three users from the Enterprise who needs to see the contract information document based on the years, the contracts have been created. To achieve this requirement the report has to be filtered on the YEAR condition.
Concept of Profiles:
What are Profiles?
Profiles are like objects in the BO system that provides a way to classify users and groups. They act as a supplement with publications to personalize the content that users see. Profiles link users and groups to profile targets and values, which are used to personalize data within a report.
Note: Profiles filter the view of the data; they do not change the data being queried from the data source.
What are Profile Targets and Values?
Profile targets are data sources that a publication tries to interact with to provide personalized documents. There are two types of profile
targets.
- Local Profile
- Global Profile
Global Profile:
A global profile target usually is a universe and an object within that universe the universe needs to be specified. This type of profile target can filter all source documents that use the universe.
For E.g. Year Object in the XYZ Universe.
Target values are the attributes used for the profiles, in this case year 2011, 2012, 2013 needs to be mapped to the target profiles appropriately in Central Management Console.
Local Profile:
A local profile target can be a field or parameter or a variable in a Web Intelligence document. When a local profile target is used, the source document alone that contains the local profile target is filtered for the publication recipients.
Formats :
Destination:
The document can be sent to the recipients in various formats. Usually it is sent through mail or BI inbox.
Scheduling:
Report Bursting:
It is the process in which each report (document) is refreshed against the data sources created, and personalized before the publication is delivered to intended recipients. Usually the report bursting method uses the Business Objects logon credentials of the publisher to refresh data in document.
Depending on the size of the publication, number of recipients and security a publisher can choose from a list of bursting methods.
One database fetch for all recipients
In this method the data in document is refreshed only once in the publication, personalized and delivered to each recipient.
This is the default option. It is also the recommended option if you want to minimize the impact of Publishing on your database. This option is secure only when the source documents are delivered as static documents (format is pdf or xls)
For example consider the following scenario,
A publication has a list of documents that provide the billing information for clients X,Y,Z. If this publication where to send the refreshed original document to the recipients in list. The other clients will be able to modify and each other’s data. However, if the document was to be delivered as a PDF or .xls, the data would be secure. The performance of this option varies depending on the number of recipients.
One database fetch per recipient
The data in a document is refreshed for every recipient. For example, if there are five recipients for a publication, the publication is refreshed five times. This option is recommended if you want to maximize security for delivered publications.
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