Broadcasting, Scheduling & Information Bursting with Design Studio / Lumira Designer

Broadcasting & Scheduling with Lumira Designer

Broadcasting & scheduling may have been the most eagerly awaited feature of release 2.1 of Lumira Designer: https://blogs.sap.com/2017/12/11/what-is-new-in-sap-lumira-2.1-asug-webcast-reporting2017/

Finally, also those customers, who had implemented Bex Broadcaster for their Bex Web Application Desginer Applications, can start moving their reporting to Lumira!

Unfortunately, some broadcasting, scheduling and bursting scenarios still cannot be implemented with 2.1. This article shall give you a solution proposal what to do if the standard functionality does not meet your requirements!

Scenarios that cannot be implemented in the current version are:

• Sending of sophisticated PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents or Excel exports is not possible.
• Information Bursting with individual filters for each user (in addition to their authorization) is not possible
• Scheduling of variants of a dashboard (e.g. a specific drilldown or view) is not possible
• Simple end user UI to administer broadcasts is missing
• Broadcasting of Design Studio 1.x is not supported. Customers must migrate to Lumira Designer 2.1!

Broadcasting, Scheduling and Information Bursting with the biExport addon

The biExport add-on for Lumira Designer & Design Studio has supported scheduling, broadcasting and information bursting since 2016.

Its key features are:

• Supports Design Studio 1.x and Lumira 2.x
• Supports PDF, PowerPoint, Word and Excel formats
• Respects user authorizations
• Supports additional filters and parameters to be passed –schedule a bookmark or certain view / drilldown of the dashboard
• Can burst individual views / filter selections to different users
• Can be flexibly integrated into your application / definition of an “Broadcast Administration” application
• Supports flexible definition of the export document (the key feature of our biExport solution)
• Offers various output channels: Mail, file server, sharepoint, web service, SAP BO CMS, etc

Here is an overview of the different putput channels from the biExport documentation:

All these features make scheduling and broadcasting via our biExport solution really flexible!

Example Implementation

Now I want to show you how easy it is to add biExport Scheduling & Broadcasting to your Lumira Designer / Design Studio application:

First of all, biExport reuses its powerful Booklet generation and iteration feature to execute applications in a background job. This feature is e.g. used to export all tabs of an application (for details see http://www.designstudio-export.com/blog/how-to-export-all-tabs-of-your-lumira-designer-design-studio-dashboard-).

The following parameters control what is exported, which parameters are passed, when the export shall take place, and where it shall be stored:

1. “Alternative Export Application”:

Here you enter one or multiple application(s) which shall be executed for the export.

2. “URL Parameters”:

Here you can enter parameters that shall be attached to the execution to produce a specific view of the application.

3. “Scheduling Parameters”:

You can define a start and end date, you can define the number of runs and the frequence. With “Event name” and “Event value” you can even attach the schedule to an event, which can be e.g. triggered from the SAP BW system. Sending the documents whenever data has changed in the system can be implemented easily with this feature!

4. “Publish Mode”:

Publish Mode defines the output channel. In my case, I have set it to MAIL….

… and I have set the additional mail parameters:

Because I want to deliver different regional views to different users, I have defined an array of mail recipients….

…. which simply assigns different filter contexts to diffent mail addresses!

Of course, you can set all these parameters dynamically via scripting. E.g. a master data query can act as a source for the Information Bursting assignments. And an administration panel such as the following can act as a scheduling frontend:

Hope you like this addon! More Information is available on www.designstudio-export.com!

Thilo