SAP Analysis Office + SAP Analytics Cloud add-in for Microsoft Office Road Map Updates

This was from a webcast last month.  The usual legal disclaimer applies; things in the future are subject to change.

Below are some notes

Source: SAP

What is needed for do-it-yourself analytics, according to SAP:

1. Quick access to any data. Relational, OLAP, unstructured, cloud, etc. and the ability to clean the data and transform it to apply to  business scenarios.

2. Need to be able to explore and understand the data to find hidden insights, looks at the data in different ways, find out what things influence  business outcomes. Need to be able to communicate our findings out to other people in the form of tables, visualizations and stories.

3. Need to use that data to plan and predict the next steps. Need to quickly understand the best next course of action, and how those actions (and different actions) may affect business.

And we need this all in one place in an integrated experience that is super fast and agile.

SAP feels they are close to releasing features in the cloud that brings all of this together in a single, turn-key experience for anyone. (source: SAP)

Source: SAP

SAP Analysis Office has more than 1 million users

SAP wants to work on quality and stability

What I also learned in a webcast last week is that Analysis for Office is built in .NET technology which is in maintenance on the Microsoft side.

Source: SAP

SAP Analytics Cloud, Add-In for Microsoft Office is SAP’s primary MS Office planning front end solution moving forward

Source: SAP

Mass data entry mode – helps in performance
Sort members in the grid

Future – Q1 – ranking
Smart member selector

Deliver every 4 weeks

Subset of Question & Answer:

Q: What about analysis office publications, email distribution to non-SAC users? We send thousands of emails with excel attachments to external users. How do we do this going forward without BI platform?
A: SAC backend you can use scheduling, but not with excel, schedule stories and export pdf but not excel. Not planned for SAC.
Q: Is there BexGet support on the Cloud version? How to migrate complex workbook content. Yes we still use bex analyzer workbooks too
A: Not yet, the migration from Bex to Analysis Office needs to be done, it is a part of SAP road map, hoping for May or June.
Q: Will there be SAP Data Warehouse Cloud support for AO (Analysis Office)?
No, it was on the road map but SAP removed it, because now SAP really wants to support DWC (Data Warehouse Cloud)with this new SAC add-in. Not with AO.
Q: Will there be any additional enhancements to AO Desktop? For example, the ability to filter based on measures or advanced sorting with native HANA is sorely missing (like we can do with BEx today).
A: Yes, you may have seen the few enhancement plans for AO. SAP will continue to develop feature reading. It will be 1 or 2 maximum features per year. The development has not stopped.

Related:

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