SAP BusinessObjects Explorer ... Quo vadis ?

[IngoH]

I would hope that most of the people here have heard the term "Quo vadis" before, but in case this is the first time you hearing this - it mean "where are you going" in classic Latin. So now you know something more about me : did grow up in Germany and have learned classic Latin for 8 years as probably lots of my former colleagues in Walldorf.

Lots of you are probably aware that SAP BusinessObjects Explorer doesn't really have a "bright future" as part of the BI portfolio simplification.

Source: SAP

As you can see above, Explorer is not a strategic investment anymore and SAP expects customers to move to either Lumira Desktop or Design Studio.

So that's all great,... but

...Explorer was a web based scenario, so Lumira Desktop would mean to switch to a desktop based application and that might not necessarily what you are looking for.

.... so that leaves Design Studio, but it doesn't deliver the necessary components (for example a facet navigation) and there is no out of the box template or application delivered, so you would have to build it yourself.

That is why we thought that this is a good opportunity to create a pre-built application that is providing customers the experience that SAP BusinessObjects Explorer did provide before.

... and Visual BI Explorer is born.

So what is the functionality the application provides ?

• Users can switch between different data sources on the fly
• a Facet navigation provides out of the box cascading filtering
• The facet navigation provides access to the list of measures and allows to switch between different measures
• Chart Type can be changed
• Dimension and Measure assignment for the chart can be changed
• The display at the bottom can be based on the Chart, Table, or both
• We integrated the Online composition capabilities to provide similar functionalities to the former Exploration Views
• We integrate export to PDF, PPT, and eMail

This pre-built application does require our Visual BI Extensions for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio as it uses several components to provide the functionality.

In case you are interested, feel free to register for our Extensions Trial and we will make sure you receive access to the application.