What’s New in SAP Lumira 1.18 (summary)

SAP Lumira 1.18 is out folks!

Just as the heat from Sapphire 2014 is about to cool down, SAP Lumira team is releasing our next incremental release, SAP Lumira 1.18. Our agile delivery train is back on track with no summer vacation.

With less than a month of development cycle, we kept our focus on:

• feedback from Lumira 1.17 Customer Validation
• incrementally delivering on the vision and key principles we shared at Sapphire
• less coding and more testing

Here are highlights of what you can expect in this release in a nutshell:

One of the monumental updates you saw in Lumira 1.17 was our promise to simplify user experience by unifying Visualize and Compose rooms across Lumira desktop, server, and cloud.  Lumira 1.18 continues to deliver incremental updates to close the gap.

From the visualization gallery, you can switch the orders of the visualizations by dragging-and-dropping the thumbnails.  The order will be respected in the visualization list in the Compose room. The order is also used when viewing the story page by page on server and cloud, if the story does not yet have a  layout defined. This behavior provides PowerPoint like presentation mode.

The facets in the Visualize room can now show and sort by number of occurrences similar to facets in Prepare room in Lumira desktop.

When you create a filter from a text dimension in the Visualize room, you can also show and sort by occurrences in the list of values.

Up next, use Lumira 1.18 to access the latest and greatest relational universe data sources from SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 SP4 platform. Visualize data from trusted sources from trusted platform. Although there was no time to deliver significant updates to our support for SAP BW direct connectivity, several usability issues reported during the 1.17 Customer Validation programs are addressed. You can expect more exciting enhancements to our BW support in upcoming releases.

Powered, by SAP HANA Cloud Integration (HCI), your administrator can now configure the upload setting to only refresh the data changed since the last upload. See this comprehensive blog by Jay Xiong for more details as well as our user guide.

SAP Lumira 1.17 integrates with SAP Fiori allowing you to consolidate, personalize, and view key applications and information in an easily accessible manner. SAP Smart Business is a Fiori application that provides pre-defined scenarios for different lines of business and industries with important KPIs for business users. With SAP Fiori wave 5 and SAP Lumira Server 1.18, you can link the KPI tile to Lumira story to further drill down what is behind the KPI value and perform visual analysis. Lumira 1.18 also extends reach of our mobile users with addition of Windows 8.1 tablet support.

Besides these key enhancements, there have been various performance improvements throughout the product with more to come in upcoming releases.  We would definitely like to hear from you whether you are seeing improvements and any other feedback you may have.

Just to let you in on a classified information, our development team is already far into Lumira 1.19 development and we are also actively elaborating on requirements for next releases. We are really excited about what we are working hard to deliver in 2H 2014 and are looking forward to hearing more about your ideas in Idea Place.

As usual, please refer to official documentation and tutorials for more detailed information.

Thank you.

Sharon