In conversations with many of our customers who are using Analysis for Office, we have discovered that scheduling is high on their list of challenges. APOS solutions provide a wide range of capabilities to support Analysis for Office users from data analysts to IT use and maintenance, particularly with regard to:

• Individual scheduling
• Enterprise Scheduling

Analysis for Office Individual Scheduling

One of the reasons that AO adoption rates are so high is that the interface is so familiar to users, and this familiarity makes it easy to use for discovery and analysis. However, this ease of use does not extend to scheduling and distribution.

Analysts will find many scheduling needs, such as:

• Scheduling for personal use
• Scheduling for team use
• Repeated, recurring scheduling

APOS Administrator simplifies and streamlines the scheduling and instance management process, making scheduling for Analysis for Office flexible, scalable, and reusable.
If you need to send two or three reports per week to a limited number of internal stakeholders, then Analysis for Office’s scheduling capabilities are adequate. If you need to send hundreds of reports to thousands of internal and external contacts in multiple formats to multiple destination types, then Analysis for Office may present challenges. The greatest challenge with Analysis for Office scheduling is the need to re-enter prompts every time you need to schedule a report.

Scheduling BW reports in Analysis for Office can be time- and labor-intensive. APOS Administrator’s InfoScheduler module lets you can create and save schedules in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, using copy and paste to maintain and update prompts easily. The Instance Manager module lets you monitor jobs for failed instances and quickly reschedule in bulk, with or without changes.

APOS Administrator offers you state-of-the-art scheduling capabilities:

• The InfoScheduler module enables simple and powerful creation of lists of schedules in an Excel interface to schedule Analysis for Office documents in bulk
• It provides a simple, easy to use, familiar Excel interface for managing and executing schedules
• You can scan across folders for Analysis for Office instances and schedules to build up schedule lists for bulk scheduling
• You can manage and update report parameters and filters quickly and easily
• You can save scheduling spreadsheets for future modification and reuse

The APOS Infoscheduler Microsoft Excel Interface

 

Selecting an Analysis for Office workbook for scheduling

 

Do you need flexible, scalable, reusable bulk scheduling capabilities?
See how APOS Administrator can help.

Analysis for Office Enterprise Scheduling

For more complex distribution requirements, you may need a more robust set of enterprise scheduling requirements. There are many scenarios in which AO users need even more flexibility and more automation. For example:

• Scheduling for large, diverse groups
• Scheduling for external stakeholders
• Scheduling to different formats and destination types

An enterprise scheduling strategy should include:

• Data-driven scheduling and bursting
• A wide variety of available destinations and formats
• The ability to consolidate reports

APOS Publisher provides all of this and more:

• Advanced Bursting Manager module achieves a high degree of automation through bursting definitions that are tied directly to your SAP BusinessObjects system
• Use complex bursting capabilities to automate nested document production workflows
• Monitor your publishing workflows, audit completed workflows, receive alerts when errors occur
• Configure all burst settings, and gain visibility to queues, collections, batches, projects and requests as they are executed for complete interactive process control

Data-Driven Scheduling & Bursting

Data-driven scheduling and bursting capabilities allow you to use data to automate much of the publishing process. Use business rules and a security-driven process to burst recipient-specific reports. You can:

• Customize content to information consumer data permissions
• Slice information using parameters/prompts, filters, or selection formulas
• Populate dynamic lists of parameters and values directly from security/permissions data

Enhanced Destinations & Formats

Use APOS Publisher to distribute instances to many different destination types simultaneously, including:

• Printer (multiple simultaneously)
• Network file location
• Email as attachment
• Email as content
• FTP
• SSL FTP
• Secure Shell FTP
• Content management system

Choose the formats you need:

• PDF
• XPS
• CSV
• XLSX
• XLS
• HTML
• MHTML
• XML
• ODS (Open Doc Spreadsheet)
• OXML (Open XML)
• TXT (tab delimited)

Consolidating Reports

APOS Publisher also lets you build a package of reports for individual information consumers so they receive a single consolidated report, in one format (such as PDF or Excel spreadsheet), rather than a series of disconnected reports in mutliple formats. You can also blend Analysis for Office content with other BI content types such as Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports.

Do you need bursting capabilities to deliver reports to diverse destinations in different formats?
See how APOS Publisher can help.