Preface

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1 (formerly known as Xcelsius) is a desktop dashboard and visualization solution that is a core part of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1. 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 SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, we can accomplish the following:

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards in its original conception was a way to build visualizations and dashboards using Excel data. That is also where the original name Xcelsius comes from. Over the past decade, BusinessObjects has enhanced Xcelsius into a fully featured enterprise-ready dashboard solution that works with any data source.

After the acquisition of BusinessObjects by SAP, the mission to make Xcelsius a dashboard product to serve all its customers (beyond being just a personal productivity tool) continued. The BI market and SAP customers were also demanding an enterprise dashboard solution for the types of projects they were using Xcelsius for, for example, dashboards for thousands of users using large data warehouses as a datasource. The name Xcelsius was no longer meaningful or relevant.

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 later in the preface). In this book, we use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to refer to the tool itself.