Thursday, August 22, 2024

Scheduling & Broadcasting Analysis for Office Reports in SAP Analytics Cloud

Organizations using SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office (AfO) to complement SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) are looking for secure ways to schedule and broadcast their AfO reports. Only when this functionality is available in SAC will such organizations be able to move beyond SAP BusinessObjects fully.

Analytical insights cannot function in isolation: they must be communicated to the people that need them at the executive, management, operational, and sales and marketing levels of the organization. That is why BEx Broadcaster existed as a companion technology to BEx Analyzer, and why SAP BusinessObjects has been so strongly aligned with AfO.

The lack of report scheduling and broadcasting capabilities for AfO in SAP Analytics Cloud is delaying or preventing many of these organizations from making a move to adopt SAP Analytics Cloud fully. Organizations wanting to move beyond the use of SAP BusinessObjects to address their AfO report broadcasting have had no way to do so - until recently. Now the APOS Publisher for Cloud solution enables AfO report scheduling and broadcasting.

AfO Scheduling & Report Broadcasting

The continuing popularity of AfO is partly a tribute to the importance of Microsoft Excel as the historical standard in financial analysis, but more importantly it demonstrates that AfO is a convenient and dependable means of providing timely analysis of real-time data. It supplements analytics applications such as SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects by allowing users to slice and dice information with Excel's pivot table functionality.

SAP BusinessObjects has provided the primary means for many organizations to push these insights out to information consumers, but maintaining an SAP BusinessObjects deployment for this one purpose is neither practical nor desirable.

Insights don't exist in a vacuum: they need to be communicated to be effective. BEx and pre-Cloud AfO had publications capability with BEx Broadcaster and SAP BusinessObjects, but there are no built-in scheduling and broadcasting capabilities for AfO in SAP Analytics Cloud.

There are two use cases that account for the majority of SAP AfO customer report broadcasting needs:

• " Moving Beyond SAP BusinessObjects - customers planning their full move from SAP BusinessObjects to SAP Analytics Cloud and the SAP AfO Edition for SAP Analytics Cloud, but cannot achieve these objectives without AfO scheduling and broadcasting capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud.
• " Moving Beyond BEx Broadcaster - customers undergoing digital modernization by moving from BW to BW/4HANA seek to replace BEx Analyzer and BEx Broadcaster with AfO. Such customers do not want to begin a new deployment of a full SAP BusinessObjects system as the means of broadcasting AfO reports, but instead prefer the modernized benefits of SAP Analytics Cloud.

Moving AfO Beyond SAP BusinessObjects

The SAP world is moving to the cloud. In analytics, SAP Analytics Cloud is the path forward, and AfO functionality is also following that path. To move fully to the Cloud, organizations need to find an alternative to AfO scheduling and broadcasting in SAP BusinessObjects Publications.

Moving AfO reports to the SAP Analytics Cloud Repository is the first step, making them available to your SAC users. However, to schedule and broadcast these reports, they will have to use a third-party solution such as APOS Publisher for Cloud.

APOS Publisher for Cloud

APOS Publisher for Cloud is a report broadcasting solution for SAP Analytics Cloud. It provides greater flexibility, availability, scalability, and higher volume than the native SAP Analytics Cloud Publications function.

APOS Publisher for Cloud is simple to deploy and use - much simpler than maintaining an SAP BusinessObjects deployment - and can be used to schedule and broadcast AfO reports, SAC stories, and SAC applications.

APOS Publisher for Cloud's advanced scheduling and broadcasting support for AfO reports lets you replace AfO report scheduling in SAP BusinessObjects (as well as BEx Broadcaster workflows), providing:

• Automated broadcasting:
  Data driven report filtering and distribution processes
• Expanded formats:
  Excel, CSV, PDF, Text, MHTML, ODS (open document for office), XML, OXML (office open XML), XPS (print format)
• Expanded destinations:
  Email (attachment or body), network file location, FTP/FTPS
• Expanded features:
  Multi-format support, encryption and password protection

Moving Forward

While AfO is thriving in the new Cloud environment, AfO report broadcasting is not. As organizations move beyond SAP BusinessObjects, they are not seeing its Publications functionality replicated in the new environment.

APOS Publisher for Cloud provides enhanced report broadcasting for SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud Applications, and SAP Analysis for Office, extending the reach of your analytics to all stakeholders.

It is an enterprise solution, meeting all of your SAP Analytics Cloud report scheduling and broadcasting needs.

For more information, download our whitepaper:

Beyond BusinessObjects: Advanced Scheduling & Broadcasting of Analysis for Office Reports