In this chapter, you learned how to use an external data source in your dashboard. We saw how to use direct query, web services, Live Office, and XML maps to populate our dashboard with dynamic data that will be triggered on runtime, based on a prespecified triggering condition. We can now trigger our data connection to be refreshed based on a specific time and specific cell value changes, and finally when a specific value is stored in a specific Excel model cell.

In the next chapter, we will see how to secure our dashboard data. We will discuss the security model introduced in the SAP BO BI platform, and then see how to use security methods such as row-level security and object-level security.