Summary
In this post, I’ll discuss the latest SAP BI SDK highlights and share some of the developer priorities for upcoming product releases. Topics covered include SAP Lumira , SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, SAP Crystal Reports, SAP BusinessObjects Mobile, SAP BusinessObjects Semantic Layer Universes and BI Partner test events.
Introduction
More than 13,000 companies around the world work with SAP as partners, contributing more than 35% of global SAP software revenue. SAP’s goal is to have more than one million developers building applications and solutions on SAP platforms by 2015, and analytics applications are a major part of achieving this goal. As SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott says, "Partnering is not a choice for SAP. The choice has been made."
SAP BI Developer Priorities
1. SAP Lumira
SAP Lumira continues to enhance the visualization extensions interface, with many exciting visualizations already created by the SAP Lumira partner community and also on the SAP Store. A helper utility called Vizpacker is now included with every version of SAP Lumira desktop for creating and packaging JavaScript visualization extensions. Virtually any visualization created with the popular D3 library can be integrated inside Lumira or SAP Predictive Analysis and combined with any supported data source.
Future priorities (subject to change) include supporting visualization extensions in SAP Lumira Server and SAP Lumira Cloud, as well as in SAP Design Studio and several other SAP products. Embedding storyboards into applications and webpages is now available in Lumira Cloud, and is planned in an upcoming release for Lumira Server as well. Deeper HANA integration is a top priority, as is making it easier for end users to discover and acquire partner extensions.
SAP Lumira geospatial extension by Manfred Schwarz
2. SAP BusinessObjects BI Products
SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio released an SDK in November 2013 allowing developers to build custom components to enhance Design Studio applications. Tutorials and examples can be found in the Design Studio community site.
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile (Mobi) released version 5.1 of the Mobile BI SDK, allowing iOS developers to customize and extend the Mobile User Interface.
SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence (WebI) now supports a full REST API, available in SAP BI 4.0 SP6, SAP BI 4.1 and later versions. This SDK allows developers to customize, modify and embed Web Intelligence into nearly any development environment. The 4.1 SP2 release in November 2013 also introduced extensions points for modifying selected parts of the Web Intelligence user interface.
SAP Crystal Reports continues to integrate with the latest versions of Visual Studio, as well as Eclipse version 3. The REST API in Crystal Reports for Enterprise is designed to support the next generation of applications in nearly any developer environment.
The BI Semantic Layer introduced in 4.1 SP2 the SAP BusinessObjects BI Universe Connector, a Web Service API allowing applications to connect to Universe data and metadata. With this connectivity, developers and IT can provide interoperability between SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 environments
and other applications. As announced in March 2014, the Microsoft Power BI team is using the BI Universe connector to build BusinessObjects universe connectivity into Microsoft Excel.
3. Partner Events
The third major area of focus is building stronger links between the SAP partner community and the SAP Product core development teams. More than 40 Partner test events are planned throughout 2014 at all the major SAP development sites, including Palo Alto, Paris, Walldorf, Bangalore, Philadelphia, Shanghai and Vancouver. More events are being added all the time; you can see the regularly updated list of events for the next months at http://www.sappartneredge.com/BIT
These free events have limited availability and are run by the BI Product teams creating the software. They are your best chance to connect with the Product Team, try pre-release versions of the software and develop your BI product expertise. Topics covered vary by site and date, and agendas and scope are available.
We look forward to shared success in 2014 with you as we build great customer solutions together.
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