Innovation
Many users of the SAP BusinessObjects architecture are not aware of how report publishing, also known as "bursting", works. It is often the case that these already integrated services are not even known.
Publishing automatically makes documents such as Crystal Reports reports and web intelligence documents available via email or FTP, stored on disk and managed via the BI platform (for web viewing, archiving, retrieval and scheduled processing).
You can customise documents in the BI Launchpad or the Central Management Console (CMC) in the platform for different users and recipients, schedule them to run at specific intervals and send them to different destinations, including BI inboxes and email addresses.
This automated process can be planned precisely and on schedule, replacing manual publication.
A publication is a compilation of documents that are to be distributed to a wide audience. Before distributing the documents, the publisher defines the publication using a range of metadata. The metadata includes the source of the publication, its recipients and personal settings.
With the help of publications, information can be sent more efficiently within a company: Example:
You can create different types of publications based on Crystal Reports reports or Web Intelligence documents.
Of course, publishing alone is not enough. First of all, you need a report that you can publish! This is where SAP Crystal Reports can help.
Digitalisation has massively increased the amount of business-relevant data. It is therefore increasingly important for a company today to have a reliable reporting system that is able to provide the required data for a variety of use cases quickly and completely.
This is exactly what SAP Crystal Reports offers. The software is essentially used to design reports. Report control allows reports to be output or generated in various formats. Control software is usually developed for this purpose, which generates and processes individual reports according to requirements. However, Crystal Reports offers complete integration into the SAP Business Objects Suite from the ground up, so that it is possible to integrate almost the full range of functions of the programme into the control software. This full integration would not be possible with another reporting tool such as Tableau, for example.
Crystal Reports is able to create simple reports as well as extremely detailed reports. This wide-ranging capability makes Crystal Reports suitable for both inexperienced users and users with years of experience.
Dynamic recipients are publication recipients that do not have user accounts in the BI platform, but have user information in an external data source such as a database or an LDAP or AD directory.
To distribute a publication to dynamic recipients, use a dynamic recipient source. This is a document or a custom data provider that provides information on the recipients of the publication outside the BI platform. You can use one dynamic recipient source per publication to create a direct link to an external data source and retrieve the current data for dynamic recipients. Dynamic recipient sources reduce administration costs as you do not need to create BI platform user accounts for dynamic recipients before distributing publications to them.
Now that you know all the building blocks, the next step is to personalise the report.
Personalisation describes the filtering of data in source documents so that only relevant data is displayed for recipients of the publication. Personalisation changes the view of the data without changing or saving the data retrieved from the data source.
The following figure illustrates how personalisation works. For example, a non-personalised report contains data types 1, 2 and 3. When personalisation is applied to the report, users only receive the data relevant to them. User 2 will only receive data type 2, user 1 will only receive data type 1, and user 3 will only receive data type 3.
There is a central database system in which all relevant company data is stored. This can be the productive system, but also a data warehouse designed for this purpose. The SAP BO Suite manages access to the database system and thus represents the link between the user, the report and the database system. In this way, the system remains maintainable, as the interfaces between report and data are manageable and the user remains in control of report creation and management with the help of SAP Business Objects.
I hope this blog has given you or your company some food for thought in the right direction when it comes to designing a fully comprehensive reporting system.
Analytics Consultant
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