Schedule Publications in SAP Analytics Cloud

Recently the ability to Schedule Publications of Stories and Analytic Applications has been included in SAP Analytics Cloud.  I will give a few pointers when creating Schedule Publications later but let’s get started by configuring the SAC tenant to allow Scheduled Publications.

Schedule Publications are not turned on by default so a user with Admin rights will need to toggle on “Allow Schedule Publications” in system administration.  Additionally, you can allow your schedules to be sent over to Non-SAC users by toggling “Allow Schedule Publication to non-SAC users”

Now that Schedule Publications is enabled you need to give users the rights to use it.   This right is not included in the default ‘BI Content Creator’ role so it will either need to be added or a new role created.  Additionally, Schedule Publications can use the concept of Teams in SAC for distribution lists.  The default ‘BI Content Creator’ role can only read Teams, not create or update them.

Default BI Content Creator Role

The SAC administrator might want to consider creating a custom role that combines both sets of rights and apply this role to those users who need to create Schedule Publications.  This could either be a simple “Save As” of the default BI Content Creator role and then add the extra rights or create a new custom role just for Schedule Publications.

Custom Role with extended rights for Schedule Publication

You can find information on creating and assigning roles in SAC Help – Roles

Schedule a Publication

Schedule Publication is found in the Share drop box when a story is in View mode, be aware that the feature is greyed out in Design mode

Schedule Publication is a simple 2 stage process, the first stage defines the structure of the Email and the second defines Which users are going to receive what personalized content view(bookmarks) of the story.

A few pointers when creating Schedule Publications:

1. You can set the recurrence pattern of Every X hours, Every X days or a combination of specified days every X weeks, all at a specific time.
2. You can distribute the story to either SAC users, SAC Team(s). Every publication generated can be sent to all SAC users in the Tenant , However , when it comes to a user who is not registered with SAC Tenant ‘Non-SAC users’, there is a limit of max THREE Non SAC users who can receive the publications. SAC Help – Create Teams
3. A single Scheduled Publication can be used to send tailored content to different groups of users by using multiple “Views”. Each view can tailor the data by using either a Global Bookmark or My Bookmark that have been defined in the story. SAC Help – Bookmarks in Stories
4. The maximum mail delivery size allowed per email including attachment is 12Mb
5. There is a maximum limit to the number of Schedule Publications allowed based on the number of SAC licenses in that tenant.
6. An updated blog about the number of publications allowed per hour can be found here