Product Information
SAP Analytics Cloud Customer Influence Q1 2022
It’s a new year and we have almost 40 new features available now for you to enjoy in SAP Analytics Cloud in QRC1 2022. In this blog we will highlight the features requested and voted for by you, our Customers via the Customer Influence Portal.
Administration and Service Management
Administration Cockpit
Not a surprise one of our Top 5 for this quarter is the general availability of the SAP Analytics Cloud Administration Cockpit. The new Cockpit provides fast and easy access to system usage information to help administrators proactively manage their SAP Analytics Cloud tenants. It enables easier identification and reporting of:
- Authorization assignments regarding user, team, roles, sharing settings of folder, analytic applications, stories and more
- Where-used models, data actions and questions related to housekeeping
Delivering so much rich functionality it is also no surprise that this new feature has 9 individual Customer Requests amassing an astounding 227 votes. These requests include:
- Where used for Live-Connection Models
- Add lineage / where used information to objects (stories, models, etc.)
- Display dependencies between connections and models in usage in models/stories
- Enrich SAP Analytics Cloud Usage Tracking Content by:objects’ sharing properties & user license type
- Current Logged in User session
- SAP__SAC_USAGE enhancement
- Enterprise Readiness: security overview users / teams / roles / privileges
- Where used list for Stories, Apps, Models, etc.
- Audit Reports needed for SAC Role to Teams\Users and Folders to Teams\Users w/ access level mapping
To learn more check out our Top 5 Video and Product Update videos. Alternatively you can find more details in this great blog by Thomas Fery
There is plenty more features for Administrators in this release including the ability to configure the default logo in the shell for SAP Analytics Cloud with another logo of the customer’s choice. This can be a PNG or GIF file and it can be uploaded through the new Shell Configuration section in the administration area.
Customizing SAP Logo in SAP Analytics Cloud
Also should an Administrator wish to include a hyperlink when creating a custom notification banner in a tenant this is now possible in Q1 2022.
We need ability to add hyperlinks to the SAP Analytics Cloud Banner messages
User Collaboration
Collaboration between users has never been more important and one of the requests we have received is the ability to trigger a notification if a user is mentioned in a comment.
When a user is tagged in a widget comment with the “@User” notation, delivery of an e-mail notification is sent that they have received a comment, providing both the comment details and a link to open the story where the comment was added
Mentions in comments should trigger notifications
Enterprise Planning & Augmented Analytics
Predictive Planning
Another one of our Top 5 picks for Q1 2022 combines two hugely popular topics for our Planning users Predictive Planning and the introduction of Multi Actions. We have added the ability to execute a predictive forecast within the planning workflow by adding a predictive step within a multi action.
Ability to schedule estimation of the Smart Predict model in the SAC Calendar
Predictive step is now available within the multi actions designer to retrain a predictive model based on the freshest state of your data and write time series forecasts into your planning.
Enterprise Planning
Continuing with Planning we had a lot of great new features in Q1 2022. Firstly a popular topic with more than 50 votes is the support of Multiple parent/child account hierarchies. This simplifies plan modeling and enables more flexibility to support management reporting requirements. This is valid for both Account and the New Model.
Have more than one hierarchy in the account dimension
Adding to the investments in Advanced Formulas within SAP Analytics Cloud Planning we introduce enhanced cross-model calculations & data referencing. With this new feature we can easily and flexibly define calculation scope and perform complex cross model calculations and data retrieval. This includes:
- New MODEL/ENDMODEL and MEMBERSET to define scope of reference models
- Use dimensions and attributes from a linked model in the IF or FOREACH scope
- Use the LINK function to return a certain range of data from a source model and redirect it by using attributes of dimensions from linked model in the DATA function
Make Cross-Model Copy Actions Functional
With the continued investment in both Plan Entry and Advanced Formula functionality we were also able to deliver the below 2 customer requests:
SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office
Another much requested topic is the ability to refresh single tables or data sources within a workbook. By enabling this users won’t have to wait until ALL tables are refreshed in a workbook when analyzing data in an active worksheet.
Users will see a new option in Microsoft Excel to refresh data for a complete workbook or to select a particular data source to be refreshed. This consists of
- New “refresh data source” option within the add-in ribbon toolbar
- Replacement of the existing refresh button with a menu button that has two menu entries: “refresh all” and “refresh data source”
- Renaming of the existing refresh functionality to “refresh all”
To allow REFRESH button to have the option to refresh ALL worksheets or ONLY the active one
Customer Influence Portal
Finally, you can get the full list of all requests for SAP Analytics Cloud in the Customer Influence Portal. Here you can have your say by adding your own ideas and requests for new features in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Our customer requests Open for Voting have now over 2500 requests so get in raise your requests and cast your votes to have your say.
If there is an area that is of particular interest to you for example Data Exploration, you can narrow your search to just these requests using the filter bar.
We want to continue hearing from you so get voting!
Congrats Adam Nekola - thanks for having raised Ability to schedule estimation of the Smart Predict model in the SAC Calendar
Thank you Antoine CHABERT. I am glad we made it to production. 🙂 Looking forward to use it on some customer tenant.
Thanks, Orla Cullen for sharing! Great to see that some of our requests submitted actually end up being delivered!
The Administration Cockpit looks pretty cool but the performance seems to be very bad. The initial loading takes really forever in regards to what I'm sued to from any SAC report where the data resides inside SAC. Will this be improved in the future?
Hi,
Based on the information from the section “User Collaboration”, the SAC Roadmap, the What’s New in SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom Q1 2022 blog post and the Customer Influence, notifications for comments are again available.
I have access to 2 separate tenants (one of them is a Cloud test and demo tenant) but both have the same system version 2022.2.7. For the non-productive tenant notification are working fine in both ways (emails and the notification panel) but for the productive tenant unfortunately notifications by tagging users are not working.
I noticed that in the second tenant tagged users after refreshing stories are displayed in black and in the working tenant the font stays highlighted in blue.
Do you know what can be the reason of not working notifications for comments with “@User” notation? I tested it with tagging a user in comments on pages, texts and charts.
Regards,
Paula