What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom – Release 2017.04

This blog covers some of the latest new features and enhancements in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom release 2017.04. Please note that SAP BusinessObjects Cloud agent must be upgraded to 1.0.47 in conjunction with the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud upgrade to 2017.04.

Highlights of this release include:

New Help Center dialog
Acquire data from a Progress OpenEdge JDBC database
Insuring optimal performance when acquiring data from cloud sources
Combined quick action menu for the table widget
Loading canvas tiles in order from the top
Planner Reporter role can now work with currency tables

New SAP BusinessObjects Cloud content
Before we get into the new features for release 2017.04, I’d also like to mention that we have new content available, free of charge, for SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and the SAP Digital Boardroom. This includes a new retail best practices package, content for Concur (Travel and Expense), HR – Recruiting, and a Marketing best practices package. You can download this content and read more about it here.

Learn with our latest video tutorials

Core: User Assistance & Infrastructure

New Help Center Dialog

Designing an easy-to-use, friendly experience is at the heart of everything we do. In this release, we’re pleased to bring you a new and improved Help experience. Just click the Help icon in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud to get quick access to:

Open a Getting Started topic
Open online help
Go to a list of video tutorials
Read the latest What’s New information
Browse the community
Search the knowledge base
Send feedback about the product
Submit your ideas for the product

Core: Data Integration

Acquire data from a Progress OpenEdge JDBC database

You can now acquire data from a Progress OpenEdge database. Creating a connection to Progress OpenEdge is the same as any other SQL database connection.

As always, we recommend that you check the System Requirements and Technical Prerequisites page in the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud Help Guide for the most up to date information on supported data sources.

Insuring optimal performance when acquiring data from cloud sources

Acquiring large amounts of data from cloud data sources can be a time-consuming activity. Now, data acquisition limits for the number of rows and columns are applied to maintain good performance.

Core: Data Analysis, Stories, and Tables

Combined quick action menu for the table widget

In previous versions, the quick action menu for tables was a separate menu of its own. In this release, we’ve simplified things by combining the table quick action menu with the widget quick action menu. This means that Show/Hide options and other functionalities are now available in the same dropdown menu. The location of the hyperlink action menu is also now consistent with the chart.

Loading canvas tiles in order from the top

In previous releases, the story canvas would simply load canvas tiles as they are created. This is usually fine if you don’t have many tiles on your canvas. But for larger and more complex canvases with lots widgets to load, we wanted to help you see your content at the top more quickly so we’ve reprioritized them to initialize before other tiles further down.

Planning

Planner Reporter role can now work with currency tables

The Planner Reporter role in BusinessObjects Cloud can perform planning activities such as revenue planning. Typically you would assign this role to people in your organization that do planning and budgeting, so it would make sense for this role to have the authorization for working with currency tables. This release of BusinessObjects Cloud now gives the role this ability. Users with the Planner Reporter role can now specify new currency exchange rates as needed for planning tasks.