SAP BusinessObjects Analysis 1.3, edition for Microsoft Office  - Ramp-up has started

SAP BusinessObjects Analysis 1.3, edition for Microsoft Office – What‘s new?

We’re excited to announce the ramp-up of SAP BusinessObjects Analysis 1.3, edition for Microsoft Office has started. This release has been influenced significantly by our appreciated customer groups (ASUG and DSAG) as well as by valuable customer feedback gathered from several discussions.

This release introduces conversion of BEx 3.5 and 7.0 workbooks. Typical workbook elements such as data source (including view), charts and some items will be converted to Analysis. Some manual processing might be necessary in case of more advanced workbooks – the log is a great help for this. Note that the converted workbooks will take advantage of the new design panel-based analytic workflow.

Our customers helped us identifying the most crucial gaps compared to BEx analyzer that still existed. Release 1.3 will now support the report-report interface (as sender) again, the variant concept (for storing and retrieving prompting values – for personal and global use) as well as storing Analysis objects (workbooks and PowerPoint presenations) in SAP NetWeaver repository.

Of course, release 1.3 will support a couple of new SAP HANA features such as hierarchies and prompts.

Among several other smaller features, Analysis offers unseen innovation: BW workspaces integration. This feature bridges the everlasting conflict between IT and business departments. The IT department ensures data consistency and security on the data in a data warehouse. This can be a time consuming task. But business needs flexibility and therefore often downloads central, consistent and secure data to a local database to enrich it with local data. From that point on, the data is disconnected from the central point of truth and might get inconsistent, and people might access information they are not supposed to see. SAP Business Warehouse 7.30 provides the solution for this conflict: BW Workspaces. With SAP BWA or SAP HANA the IT department can define departmental “playgrounds” that expose central data models, but enable business to enrich local data. BW Workspaces are completely IT governed, i.e. central data is consistent, secure and new data models can be fully managed with respect to their lifecycle. Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office offers an easy, intuitive access to this functionality in the familiar Excel environment.

We would be happy to welcome you in the ramp-up program. Please apply via this link. Note that the ramp-up process is pretty lightweight – without any organizational overhead. We would appreciate if you could send us the ramp-up survey, though, that provides us valuable feedback on the product.