Burst all your SAP Analytics Dashboards to anyone with APOS Publisher for Cloud

Bursting a Report or a Story means distributing its contents to various recipients.
It is the process of running a report once and then dividing the results for recipients, who each get to view a subset of the data as needed.

Consider an organization that needs to send a Sales Report displaying Product Sales Data to each of its Suppliers in a specific region, in such a way that only that supplier’s information reaches them.

In this case, as the number of Suppliers increases, there will be a need to automate this process and send only relevant Product Sales Data to each supplier at regular intervals.

What are the limitations of SAP Analytics Cloud as a solution to Burst or Publish a Story?

With SAP Analytics Cloud gaining its prominence as a go-to solution for Reporting needs, there is a huge need to burst SAP Analytics Cloud Stories that are being created in large numbers as a part of day-to-day activities.

• To be eligible for scheduling publications, Customers need to have a minimum of total 25 SAP Analytics Cloud licenses (which is the bare minimum number for a SAC tenant anyway)
  Under the current licensing, a customer would get a limited number of publications per hour for the entire day, i.e., 5% of a total number of SAP Analytics Cloud licenses the Customer owns in his/her Tenant.
  
  
• The below image provides details regarding the limits placed on the number of publications from SAP Analytics Cloud on an hourly/daily basis:

• Every Publication can be sent to every other SAP Analytics Cloud user registered in the SAP Analytics Cloud Tenant and to Three Non-SAP Analytics Cloud users who are not a part of the SAP Analytics Cloud Tenant, which makes it a bigger challenge to send the report to people who are not active in SAP Analytics Cloud.
• SAP Analytics Cloud Stories can be exported or shared only as PDF, PPT or Google slide format.

Publisher for Cloud solution by APOS tries to remove the above limitations of SAP Analytics Cloud and offers additional functionality to optimize information broadcasting in organizations.

Features and Functionalities of the Publisher for Cloud solution include:

• Volume or Quantity of Bursts
  It is possible to burst a very high number of SAP Analytics Cloud Stories

• Personalized Filtering
  The ability to filter reports so that your consumers receive information that is relevant to them

• Formats
  The ability to deliver SAP Analytics Cloud reports in multiple formats based on the recipient, primarily as:
  
  * PDF File
  * PPT File
  * Excel File
  * Word File
  * Image File
  * RTF File

• Destinations
  The ability to send the SAP Analytics Cloud Stories to destinations most suitable to the recipients
  • To the mailbox of a recipient as an

- Email Body (as an image or can be positioned via HTML as well)
- Email attachment

• To an SFTP Location
• To a File Server Location

• Scheduling
  The ability to automate delivery using recurring schedules

Looking at all the different features, Personalized Filtering of SAP Analytics Cloud Stories looks like the most interesting of them all.
Let us briefly look at how it is achieved in the solution by considering a scenario

An SAP Analytics Cloud Story with global data needs to be burst with a personalized filtering criterion:

• A Data source (can be an excel file or a SQL Server table which needs to have the necessary mappings i.e., can be created in Publisher for Cloud, which can be connected via ODBC/OLEDB)
• Once we have this data source ready, as well as the connection of the same created in Publisher for Cloud, we can just add a filter in the Filter Section as shown in the image below, which ensures that only relevant information is shared.

It is also possible to maintain user-specific destination and report formats in the data source, which will be followed by the APOS tool every time the process of bursting is done, as shown in the images below.

Hence there is a lot of flexibility available when it comes to filtering, formatting, placing, and personalizing the SAP Analytics Cloud Stories.

If you have a need to send a large amount of Personalized SAP Analytics Cloud Stories on a regular basis, especially if you have a large user base also consisting of non-SAP Analytics Cloud users, APOS would be a very user-friendly and powerful tool that can support your information broadcasting needs overcoming the limitations of out-of-the-box SAP Analytics Cloud functionality.

Content credit: SAP and APOS