Scheduling your data stories with SAP Analytics Cloud

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After a long wait one of the most anticipated capabilities has finally arrived to SAP Analytics Cloud:scheduling data stories and dashboards to a variety of destinations .

In this blog post I will cover the current scheduling capabilities and the road map ahead of us that will continuously add more scheduling and bursting functionality to the SAP Analytics Cloud platform.

Background

SAP announced during SAP TechEd 2019 on the about to come scheduling capabilities which were planned for Q1/2020,in the SAP Analytics Cloud roadmap which is updated for December 2019 you can see what's the current plan :

Source :SAP roadmap viewer

The updated roadmap for scheduling (02.2020) in much more detailed and offering a great deal of scheduling and bursting capabilities :



Source :SAP Embedded and Enterprise Strategy for SAP Analytics Cloud

In this extended road map for schedule publications we can see lot's of new planned capabilities that are available in the SAP BI CMC scheduling and bursting.

This is definitely the right direction for SAP Analytics Cloud supporting simple and advanced scheduling capabilities like event and calendar based triggers,support bursting (filter based profile distribution) and make sure that the information ,especially the important one is getting in the right time and the right people which are awaiting for that information to take action.

While collaboration based environments are rapidly growing (Slack ,Teams ,Azure DevOps) the requirement for data distribution ,push notification to emails and cloud locations especially to destinations which are not connected directly to our analytics platform will remain solid for the next few years

Scheduling in SAP Analytics Cloud

The scheduling capabilities are available since release 2020.03 only for SAP Analytics cloud Tenants based on the AWS data center(Cloud foundry based)

The scheduling in SAP Analytics Cloud is accessed through the share button and then the Schedule Publication option



The scheduling options are quite simple for now and as mentioned above are aligned with the roadmap plan,only PDF format is supported for now.



The recurrence is currently supporting three options :hour,day and week.the monthly option is planned for the future direction (beyond Q2/2020)



There are standard start and end recurrence and also an option to set the number of repetitions ,e.g:run weekly ,every Monday for 8 times (8 weeks) instead of setting an end date.

Once the mandatory fields are filled - Topic and SAP or non SAP Analytics Cloud recipient the schedule is set



and followed with a notification that the schedule was created successfully



If you want to track your current schedules you can navigate to the calendar and see what's the schedule status ,there is no option for now to edit the schedules but you can delete them



There are four main statuses for the scheduling :

• Inactive - awaiting it's run time


• In progress -job is currently being executed


• Cancelled - job failed


• Success - data story sent successfully to it's destination

Advanced options

For now bursting and distribution based on profiles which is handled really well in SAP BI isn’t supported (in future direction of the road map)

The bursting enables to send the same data story to different profiles based on what a profile is allowed to see (different segments of data ,e.g:region) and as we need to support both direct and indirect users the bursting enables us to use row level security which corresponds to the data source restrictions and profiles which defines the report filtering before being sent to a user which doesn't necessarily has access to the data source.

One way to enable different restrictions for different users or user groups is to us the bookmark option from the Display menu in a data story



Once you create the bookmarks you can use them in the scheduling options and basically assign different views for each group based on a bookmark that can contain the filtering logic of your data story and the rest of the story configuration



Going back to the scheduling options we can now use in the story view the option to use my bookmark and assign a view per team and therefor schedule for different teams



we can then assign to another view a different team with a different bookmark

Conclusion

Scheduling data stories is finally supported and although the current functionality is basic there is a clear and promising road map ahead that will enhance the scheduling and the SAP Analytics Cloud platform operational capabilities

For additional details you can check the 20202.03 release :

https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product_updates/release-2020-03/#_Administration_&_Infrastructure_3