Webinar Summary – Publishing & Managing SAP Analysis Office

APOS Systems hosted this webinar on April 25, 2019. The webinar recording is available on demand from the APOS website. There is much more detailed and hands-on information in the recorded webinar.

The webinar focused on supporting technologies for SAP Analysis Office. These technologies provide AO management, publishing, and content management.

APOS COO Allan Pym started by describing the APOS Manage BI S³ framework, The Manage S³ (S Three) strategy for BI & Analytics emphasizes the value of looking at management from a number of perspectives, just as you can look at the sides of a cube. Manage smart, strong, and simple. Each provides a complementary perspective on the strategic way forward.

Any organization that schedules a large number of report needs a robust delivery mechanism.

Such a delivery mechanism must be easy to use, flexible, scalable and re-usable (i.e.: you can manage and re-use your scheduling and distribution workflows).

The APOS Publisher solution allows you to automate bursting, consolidation and distribution of Analysis Office documents.

APOS Publisher automates the entire schedule process, using a database query to pull the data required for the prompts, formats, and destinations dynamically for each of the recipients. Each recipient of the report content receives only their slice of data, in the format that they need, and to the destination that is specific to their needs. It’s all about getting the right data, in the right format, to the right destination, at the right time.

APOS Publisher provides additional destinations.

APOS Publisher provides additional formats.

It can be very useful to combine multiple reports into one package, so that the recipient receives just one e-mail, with just one document that contains all of the information that they require. You can include multiple content types with the AO documents in the Consolidated Package.

The APOS Administrator solution provides scheduling creation and maintenance.

The Info Scheduler component of APOS Administrator is a Microsoft Excel-based tool that allows a user to create bulk schedules for submission to SAP BI. Each row in the spreadsheet is a unique schedule, and each column is an attribute of those schedules. You can find all of the attributes found in any SAP BI schedule page here.

Sending Analysis Offoce instance output to multiple recipients and in multiple formats is not available only when you perform large, corporate wide bursts. Starting in SAP BI 4.2 SP4, you can access this capability directly within the schedule pages of the BI Launchpad.

You can choose enhanced formats and destinations within the BI Launchpad. The system administrator can enable or disable specific destinations for certain users in order to comply with regulatory and governance requirements. For example, many organizations are choosing to disable e-mail attachments, and forcing users to log in to the SAP BI system to retrieve their report data.

Administrators can customize destinations and their properties by user to comply with system governance policies. You can choose multiple destinations and formats for a single schedule, thereby reducing the load on the system scheduling processes.

The APOS Administrator solution enables bulk instance management.

Regulatory or governance pressures will influence your policy on document retention. Keeping backups and instance archives according to a BI content storage strategy will also simplify disaster recovery.

The APOS Storage Center solution provides the capabilities you need to implement a robust BI content storage strategy.

Deep system knowledge can simplify impact analysis.

The APOS Insight solution collects and stores the relevant metadata for your Analysis Office documents.

Validation of report data is vital so that people know that the data that they are using to make decisions is trustworthy. The APOS Validation Manager solution automates report testing in a project-based environment.

Lastly, the APOS Live Data Gateway solution can unlock live data for Analysis Office, allowing access to a vastly expanded number of data sources.

Learn more about APOS solutions for SAP Analysis Office at the APOS website.