Preface
What is SAP Business Objects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius)?
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius) is a desktop dashboard and visualization solution that is a core part of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0. Once a user creates a dashboard model, it can be deployed in Flash format to Web portals, SAP environments, the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, and desktop applications such as PowerPoint, Word, or PDF.
For Dashboard designers/developers, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards allows for rapid development of data visualizations through a flexible and easy to use graphical user interface.
Using Xcelsius, we can accomplish the following:
- Create interactive dashboards that have a wow factor, unlike other dashboard tool competitors
- Connect dashboards to 12 different types of data connections
- Integration and interoperability with the existing SAP BusinessObjects BI Content
- We can embed our dashboards into a variety of different formats to allow for convenient sharing between users
- Ability to create custom add-on components using the Dashboard Design SDK
Note
Xcelsius, in its original conception, was a way to build visualizations and dashboards using Excel data. Over the past several years, SAP Business Objects has enhanced Xcelsius into a full-featured enterprise ready dashboard solution that works with any data source. As SAP continued on its mission to make Xcelsius a dashboard product to serve all its customers (beyond being just a personal productivity tool), the name Xcelsius was no longer meaningful or relevant. The BI market and SAP customers were also demanding an enterprise dashboard solution for the types of projects they were using Xcelsius for; that is dashboards for thousands of users. By changing the name Xcelsius to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP is showing its commitment to delivering a solution that serves the needs of all BI customers as well as aligning the name to the product's growing capabilities and roadmap.
The SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards portfolio consists of several different packages (see the edition comparison on next page). In this book we use Dashboard Design to refer to the tooling itself.