Connect Business Object with Xcelsius

[Former Member]

Hello,

I try to connect Xcelsius with Business Object webi. in the stallation instruction, it is optional to install Live Office, but all teh material I found are through Live Office.

Can someone help me

1. whether I can connect BO with Xcelsius without LiveOffice? How?

2. Can I use existing BO webi report as a source to Xcelsius? or I have to export my BO webi report to Excel first?

Thank you,

Tina

[amrsalem1983]

you can not connect directly to the BO Webi without the Live Office.

you have to install the live office, on the Client machine , the machine you develop the Excel sheet.

after that you import this Webi Report to the Excel.

then Import this Excel sheet to the Xcelsius

go to the Data manager in Xcelsuis, Add connection, exsiting connectiong, Live office Connections.

then you will see all the imported blocks in ur excel, so you can handle them, refresh them as you want , there is many options to do.

note , One Report may provide more than block.

good luck

Amr

[Former Member]

Thank you very much for your reply.

After seeing this, I am kind of disappointed with Xcelsius.

I even have to export my Webi report to Excel format to import in Xcelsius!!!

I don't do most of the fancy stuff with Excel itself. why we both to spend such an expensive price on Xcelsius?

Even the installation instruction is mis-leading. it says "Live office" is optional, but it is not!

Please help me to understand why we would need Xcelsius if we have BO webi, Excel?

Thanks,

Tina

[Former Member]

Advantages of Xcelsius:

- You only need Excel. No connection to BI system is required for dashboard development or deployment;

- You can export to flash which is pretty handy sometimes;

- You can put the flash in a PPT presentation, and it works even with no corporate connection:

- It has much prettier graphics then Web Inteligence (which lets face it, has horrible graphics);

- Good for building what if scenarios, with sliders.

Cons of Xcelsius:

- It has no quick/easy way to connect to BI live data. It has to use Live Office (where webservice), which has to use a universe or WebI document.....for me this is....awkard and feels like the solution is not enterprise connected at all

- If you use LiveOffice the tool is incredibily unstable. It has crashed several times, and just seems like a beta software;

- If you look at the demos in BO page they seem great. After you download them, and open them in Xcelsius you notice that the design is completly awkard, depending too much on "Visibility Conditions".

This last one is the worse for me because user interaction was supposed to be one of Xcelsius strong point. For example you have a Pie chart with 4 elements (USA, Spain, Italy, France), and have a slider for the growth rate. Looking at the demo I thought there was one sliders which changed context according to the slice I clicked. Wrong. There are in fact 4 sliders with visibility conditions. You can see the problem here right? If your live data changes and suddendly you have one more region, the dashboard stops working.....You then have to edit the dashboard, had a new slider, make sure it is completly aligned with all the other 5, probably had a new graphic for the new region....you get the point. Relying heavily on visibility conditions gives you little flexibility.

For me Xcelsius is a poor excuse for a dashboard tool, which only usefullness would be the user-friendly. It fails even here, as Web Inteligence is much more intuitive then Xcelsius. By far.

Feel free to say why I'm wrong. I would love to see that Xcelcius is indeed a good tool, instead of a Marketing device.

PS: LiveOffice is optional, because you can use Xcelsius with standalone Excels, or data that doesn't come for BO Enterprise.