Design studio: requirements for SMEs

[Wolfgang_Mayer]

Hello,

as we're currently evaluating SAP analytics visualization tools for SMEs, there are two restrictions for design studio which seem to be a no-go for SMEs, but maybe there are workarounds for that:

• Publishing a design studio report only works on BI (BO server) or BW portal. Both - mostly - is not applicable for SMEs since they often have no SAP BW, much less SAP BI (BO server). Is there a way to publish a report
  • to a different target (e.g. any web server, web application server as part of the SAP ABAP stack) or at least
  • to a SAP Portal that is not necessarily connected to an ABAP BW system. At the moment, the portal publishing option is only available when connecting to a SAP BW backend?
• Accessing data from a SAP system seems to only work for BW objects (e.g. cubes) and DDIC views. Again, if there's no BW system: what about OData? Or at least JSON or JavaConnector / JDBC? Are these officially supported as well?

Many thanks & regards

Wolfgang

[MustafaBensan · Accepted solution]

Hi Wolfgang,

In answer to your questions:

1) Publishing Platforms

Based on the Design Studio Product Availability Matrix, the only supported publishing platforms are:

(a) SAP BI (BusinessObjects)

(b) SAP NetWeaver

(c) SAP HANA

Without one of the above, I don't see any other workarounds for publishing Design Studio applications to a central portal.  As far as I am aware, if you are deploying on a NetWeaver Portal, you still need a BW System in order to access SAP ERP (via a Transient Provider or Operational Data Provider).

2) Direct Data Connections

Data connections such as OData, JDBC or other Web Services can be developed as custom data sources with the Design Studio 1.4 SDK.  So in theory, you could develop a direct connection to an SAP ERP system via OData for instance but you still have the issue of requiring one of the above supported platforms to publish the application to.

Regards,

Mustafa.

[TammyPowlas · Accepted solution]

In addition to what Mustafa said on item 2, you can access SAP ERP systems with Design Studio using transient providers, ODP providers (with ehp7) and ERP universes.