deeply disappointed customer about quality of Design Studio

[former_member201696]

Hi all,

We use now more then 2 year design studio in our company. For the first year, only the developer department use Design Studio. In this time we have migrated 700 WAD (Version 3.5) to 450 Design Studio Report.

In two years I have create more then 45 OSS Notes abound Design Studio bugs.

In the project we went Live with Version 1.5. After a short time, many users notify a several small issues and two big issues, all this issues was in basic reporting functions. This two big issues takes a long time to fixed from SAP and then we upgraded to the 1.5 SP1. Few issues was fixed and few issues come additional.

This situation we had several time, in 1 year. Also this Month with upgrade 1.6 SP2 Patch1 (4th Design Studio upgrade in 1 year), we implement this Version because the BIP Server was unstable when different user are working on the same report with different languages. We was happy that this issues was fixed, but surprise one big issues comes now new. Bookmarking are not working correct with 1.6 SP2. Answer from SAP is again, the development will fixed it in the Version 1.6 SP3.

This game we are playing the last year, four time. Every Upgrade costs us a lot of time and money. Worse is, that the end user (4500 Employee) are relay disappointed about Design Studio. Several departments refuse to work with design studio reports.

I'm impressive how many new fancy function are implemented in each new Design Studio Version, but for my 4500 End User the basic function are essential.

If you are also a disappointed customer please comment this blog! Let us discuss and share your experience in this blog. We are powerful together.

Maybe the development team will concentrate to improve the basics.

Thanks a lot for you help.

BR

Gabriel

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I have been working in the SAP BI/BW world for about 15 years now, and i always considered myself a sort of a "fanboy", but these stories sound all too familiar. The same thing has been going on for so long by now:

• ever evolving (not in a good way) roadmaps & confusing communication surrounding it, which leads to never being comfortable with choices you have made
• bugs that are "sold" as a works as designed
• basic functionalities from the old tools (WAD / BEx) that are forgotten of simply ignored in the new products and are then works as designed
• unbelievably bad performing & often frustrating front-end tools (we don't all have a 16gb RAM i7 pc and a 30inch monitor)
• decisions made by product designers & developers that in my opinion just demonstrate that they never did any BW/BI work themselves, leading to continous frustration

And always that 'please install the latest patch' crap from support. Like stated above: there are complexities & rules to upgrading clients on a user-pc in big companies. I can't repeat this cycle every 2 or 3 months!

For the amount of license we have to pay, i think it's also quite cynical to state that we will have to rely on 'partner developed extensions'. What do you think my CIO says if i have to ask for a budget for yet another new extension from an unkown little vendor, because our +100k€ license software doesn't have a solution. Big companies choose SAP (BI) for a one-stop-solution, we don't have (or want) the flexibility to again go "shopping" every X months.

[vincentdechandon · Accepted solution]

Hi Tom, thanks for your feedback, it's always good to read things like this from time to time.

Regarding your part on "custom partner extension", I understand your point of view.

As you already know, I'm myself part of this partner world, and I think creating a rich ecosystem of partner, that are able to deliver more value on specific - yet core topics, is a good thing. Mainly because partners will be (most of the time) recognized experts in their domain (Location Analytics for example, like my company Galigeo) and they will help customers get new insights way more than SAP could have.

Of course it's all part of a strategy, SAP could have chosen to hire specialists - or buy companies and do the work themselves, but this is not (always) at the core of their job.

This is also why there is a program called SolEx at SAP (which Galigeo is part of) that lets SAP reps sell directly licensing for "custom partner extensions" as a whole with SAP products.

By the way, looking forward to hear from you Tom!

Br,

Vincent

[Former Member]

I can tell that a lot of work went into Design Studio and I am glad you are soliciting feedback. I see what SAP is trying to do and yet this program feels restrictive and archaic. I'm an R programmer and used to having a wide palette for conveying information through graphics. I am used to being able to assign parameters to size, width, color, fill, transparency, gradient, layering, etc. Where are these features? ggplot2 is so robust that it allows people to invent new chart techniques. Needless to say, I feel quite restricted with Design Studio and Lumira.

I've quickly picked up Tableau and am a huge proponent of their software. It's easy to use. The hover option in particular is a favorite feature of mine as it allows me to highlight (or filter) all items that share x value. It's incredible. The interface is slick, the drag & drop is easy, and there is a vibrant user community that is happily accessible. Not only do I love it, my End Users can get to their insights faster by selecting the items that interest them and using the View Data feature to dig into their questions. SAP is so, so slow. So much clicking, so much waiting; it pales in comparison.

I want better tools to share with my End Users. When I google examples of Tableau dashboards and am inspired. When I google examples of Design Studio dashboards, it looks like stuff from the early 90s (Lumira: late 90s) and examples of what not to do. What thought leadership is Design Studio contributing to the larger data viz community? Show us better examples and ones that are, ideally, easy to build. In addition, I need the products I make to not only be elegant but accessible as well. 10% of men are colorblind. It seems I am not able to change the conditional formatting options outside of red & green; it is a disappointment.

I want to like Design studio and I’m hoping the 2.0 release alleviates these frustrations. Data viz jobs are becoming more common and I imagine that many of us are being hired by larger companies who are likely able to afford SAP and this is what we're stuck with. The field is moving fast. I have so many creative ways I want to present information to the teams that I support and I feel stymied in doing so. I’m sure that others share in my frustrations. I would suggest listening to Hadley Wickham on the Data Stories podcast series: beautiful default graphics and the ability to customize are everything. I need faster ways to bring my ideas to life.

As a side note: I cannot figure out how the CSV import works in 1.6 and thus I must depend on my developer to generate BEx queries for a mockup. This lag in the creative process inhibits my ability to sketch out ideas. The result is that I create multiple mockups in Tableau only to find that the design elements I selected aren’t possible with Design Studio or even Lumira.

I want to see this get better as I need it for my job. I hope this is feedback is helpful and that SAP will consider these features with future releases.

[vincentdechandon]

Interesting feedback.

I agree that there is too much latency in DS. It becomes decent once you are getting started on a 16GB RAM core i7 laptop .

For the "beauty" of the developped app tho, you have full access to CSS so you can create the app you want (but it requires knowledge in CSS and thus is not self-service).

Br,

Vincent

[mike_howles4]

As a side note: I cannot figure out how the CSV import works in 1.6 and thus I must depend on my developer to generate BEx queries for a mockup. This lag in the creative process inhibits my ability to sketch out ideas. The result is that I create multiple mockups in Tableau only to find that the design elements I selected aren’t possible with Design Studio or even Lumira.

Hey Jake,

Take a quick peek at this post.  I wrote a utility to convert mockup data to the format that the native CSV datasource expects.  Hope this helps!

[Former Member]

Hi all,

DESIGN STUDIO 1.6 SP3 Client UNX SQL OLEDB 2012 ISSUE

Just a heads up for anyone fighting with SQL OLEDB for SQL SERVER 2012 via UNIVERSE (UNX).

Current SP3 reads wrong a universe created over a SQL 2012 database with SQL OLEDB driver.
Ticket has been raised and the team is working on a fix. I thought this might be helpful for others who wanted to upgrade to the latest version of Design Studio.

Regards,

Bogdan

[former_member195675]

Hi Bogdan,

do you mean that Design Studio puts the wrong names to the universes? In that case, yes, we've experienced this as well, but with ODBC instead of OLEDB.

Thanks for the heads up

[Former Member]

Hi R,

It's reading a wrong universe displaying the dimension of this "wrong" universe. It's a matter of universe selection behind the scenes. So not only the metadata is different than you would expect, the data itself its from other metadata structure.

Regards,

Bogdan

[Former Member]

Hi Bogdan,

My team is currently working on this issue and we have been able to reproduce the issue internally. I have created SAP note 2372267 to detail the fix and the workaround available.

Apologies for the inconvience caused.

I will update this note when we have validated the fix for the issue and when it can be delivered.

Thanks,

Conor McEvoy

Design Studio Product Owner

[Former Member]

Hi Conor,

"nice" to read from a Developer here...

Maybe you can confirm two more things, related to DS 1.6.3:

It seems that an error, corrected in 1.5 SP2 re-occurs again:

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2251867/E

And we found out that the following change had severe impact on all our bookmarks, since we had to "correct" this behaviour to re-enable the well-known navigation for all our users:

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2315728

It is very bad that this change had been implemented globally and you don't have the possibility to activate "features" like this per Dashboard.

Thanks,

Martin

[former_member182373]

Hi Bogdan,

Is there an OSS note explaining this issue in detail yet ?

Thanks

Tony

[MustafaBensan]

Hi Tony,

The issue is documented on SAP Note 2372267 as mentioned by above.

Regards,

Mustafa.

[Former Member]

HI Conor McEvoy, and Hi all,

As a new comer to this Design Studio, am a fan of it. And i really like this application.

Its really nice to read the feedbacks from different types of users. Panel

I would like to mention one SAP note here.

2315728 - Panel onClick will now only be fired by direct click on panel

----------------------------------

Its solution is applicable for someone who is using Panel inside a Panel component.

What if some customer like me, using Grid Layout inside a Panel?

For Grid component there is no "On Click" event is there. So in my case i have to re design my whole dashboard from scratch and use Panel inside a Panel instead of Grid layout inside a Panel.

I dont know also how can i arrange my text boxes like below in Panel.

It will be good if there is "On Click" event for Grid layout also

I think it is easy to bring it for you guys...

Any body can give me some helpful answers for this?

thanks and regards,

Aby

[Former Member]

Hi Aby,

for specific questions you should open your own discussion.

For new ideas, please use the Ideaplace: https://ideas.sap.com/SBODesignStudio

BR, Martin

[Former Member]

  Hello everyone,

  We have several big issues with UNX data source,.

  -we found  it is very difficlut to caculate the growth rate. UNX data source donot surport the Measure add caculation function like BW. We are  working with the data iterator and BYOD data source, so that the property is dissatisfactory,and BYOD donot allow to drilldown and display on crosstable.

  -UNX data source is limited the loading data cell. it is limit the data display.

  -Whether we can preload the report data on BOE web portal. All ways we have attempted to optimiz the load time, but it still spend beyond 5 seconds, even 10 secs.

   Br,

   Bobby

[former_member220449]

Hello, I participate entirely to each experts opinion above.

DS can become more flexible, bug free, faster and user friendly product in future. But for now, there is competitors who are ahead in the benchmarks.

-data visualisation

-usability of the user interface

-performance

-flexibility (data merge with multiple source, data transformation level)

-speed and ease of development

Qlik and Tableau tools are kind of fusion tool DS&Lumira together.

Coskun.

[Former Member]

Yes, I do agree with Gabriel. In our organization, business compares SAP tools (Design Studio & Lumira) directly with Tableau and there are so many business uses cases which cannot be achieved in Design Studio or Lumira but are easily achieved using Tableau. Cost and SAP connectivity are only two factors we find SAP tools have a better edge. I hope Lumira and Design Studio convergence provide a powerful tool that can compete with other non-SAP products in the market or else if its the same case where we need to upgrade every time to fix a basic reporting functionality, I doubt we can have them as enterprise tools for self-serve or for building complex dashboards.

[former_member182373]

Aju,

I agree that were was a massive gap between Tableau and Lumira in earlier releases, but the current Lumira version is as good as tableau for self service . My customers are using it across a range of areas -pulling in data from SQL /ECC/ BW /Excel ,with good performance.

Its still weak for dashboards - but so is tableau.Im hoping the merged DS / Lumira will address that issue.

Tony

[IngoH]

Hi Tony,

sorry to disagree here and I am sure lots would agree with my next statement:

Tableau is clearly ahead of Lumira on the visualization front and has been for some time and even with the latest version of Lumira its a pure catch up and with Tableau 10 the gap got bigger.

When it comes to the BW integration, Lumira is lacking a lot items such as Currency / Unit / real hierarchies, ..... just to mention a few.

Do I hope that Lumira 2.0 addresses this - yes.

but lets also be realistic here and right now Lumira in its latest version is not close to what Tableau is.

regards

Ingo Hilgefort

[vincentdechandon]

I sadly agree with you Ingo.

Tho I think Lumira is pretty fine when it comes to standard needs in self-service, which are most of the times what business "needs" (but not what they want!). It's pretty straightforward, and I think Tableau is becoming a bit too "messy" : context menu have like dozens of options, etc. But when it comes to performance Tableau is far ahead for sure.

Br,

Vincent

[former_member201696]

Hi,

Today a typical problem of design studio in the basic function.

This was basic function for WAD 3.x, more then 7 year ago.

But in design studio this is not possible. The Blog from Coskun is more the 2 years old and this bug is not fix. The answer form the SAP Support is always the same:

     this is not a bug this is a features, we will take this in the backlog

But if you have contact with end user and told them, they don't understand this. The answer is, why this is not possible, we are in Year 2016 and not in 1999.

BR

Gabriel

[IngoH]

Hello Gabriel,

in case you wanna talk about possible solutions to use hierarchies with charts in Design Studio - feel free to reach out to me.

Best regards

Ingo Hilgefort, Visual BI

[former_member201696]

Hi Ingo,

Can you give us your impression? You work a long time with design studio and you a big expert.

Did you have a solution to hierarchies, with the SDK from Visual BI?

BR

Gabriel

[IngoH]

Hello Gabriel,

let me give my view / comments on some of the items that have been raised here.

Let me start with the hierarchy topic - yes we do have charts that can leverage hierarchies and that can drill down / up or expand / collapse hierarchical data within a chart. we already offer that for quite some time.

Overall Design Studio has come a long way already. Is it perfect - no.  There are items still missing that I am sure some customers are asking for, such as Variant support mentioned by Thomas (see above) or a common request is also the ability to broadcast a dashboard from Design Studio.

Design Studio is now a little over three years and I have to agree with the comment from Martin K above where he compares Design Studio with Analysis Office. When you look back at Design Studio 1.0 / 1.1 / 1.2 .... I am sure customers would look at it and not even consider to put the product into production. But since release 1.4 / 1.5 / 1.6 - customers are putting the dashboards into product and customers are working on Design Studio projects.

Let me also comment on a few items that were mentioned previously:

- Performance: They key part for performance with Design Studio is first of all the sizing of the system (BI Platform, Mobile Server) but also to make sure the dasboard itself is not making any big "design mistakes" when it comes to the data handling. What I have seen very often is that people made "mistakes" when it comes to the overall data handling.

- Bookmarking: I agree on that one. The "early days" of Bookmarking wasn't great and its still not perfect and it also doesn't help that SAP plans to "reinvent" the bookmarking concept in the next release but already in release 1.6 I would say Bookmarking is for sure in a shape that it can be used in projects right now.

Variant support: Yes that is currently not there and that is something that SAP will have to deliver to really claim Design Studio as a replacement for the Web Application Designer.

Printing: Agreed - the standard printing "isn't that great" but there are partner solutions available that are doing a much better job.

Charts / Visualization: There are standard functionality and there are partner extensions for those areas (will leave it at that).

I think there is an important "underlying" problem that happens very often. Customers see tools like Tableau or Qlik in the market and they start comparing Tableau and Qlik (and other self service BI tools - not excluding others on purpose) with Design Studio and that is a comparison where the chances are pretty high that the customer would be disappointed.

Why would the customer be disappointed ? Because Tableau and Qlik and the other Data Discovery tools are "self service" BI tools and Design Studio requires someone to "build" the environment and "write code". That is something that I have seen very often by customers, that they look at Design Studio and look at a Data Discovery tool and ... are little disappointed.

If a customer looks for data discovery the main tool in SAP's portfolio is SAP Lumira Desktop and it doesn't help that customers are disappointed with the product either.

Can Design Studio deliver a data discovery environment - absolutely. We just created a "Visual BI Explorer" application to provide customers with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer a path forward.

I also think that the current announcement of the roadmap with SAP Lumira and Design Studio and SAP calling it a "merger" but "with two BI clients" is confusing and does not help to put more trust into the product.

Do I think that SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is a great product ? Absolutely. The fact that I left SAP after 15 years and joined Visual BI to focus on adding extensions to Design Studio should be proof enough for that.

Do I think that SAP will address those gaps between Design Studio and WAD - Yes.

Do I think that Design Studio can be a replacement for Xcelsius / Dashboards - Yes it can and does already deliver far more functionality (except offline)

Do I think that customers will have to look "outside" to close some gaps - Yes and I am not saying that because I am working for a SAP Partner delivering Extensions to Design Studio. I am saying that because the SAP team is building a true Enterprise dashboarding environment and will have to focus on topics like lifecycle management, performance, versioning, ..... and that means sometimes that there is not the time to build every type of visualization that is possible - which is why there is a SDK already early on.

(long answer to a short question....)

So... do I recommend Design Studio to my customers ? yes. (I am betting my job on it)

Have we done some great "stuff" with Design Studio ? Yes we have and we keep doing so.

Will customers have to rely on extensions for Design Studio ? I do think so because SAP will not have the time to build "everything"

Is Design Studio right now "perfect" ? No its not, but I am sure people can find problems or gaps in any of the BI tools and not just SAP's BI tools or Design Studio.

I do believe that with the current release of Design Studio, Analysis Office, and the upcoming version of Lumira Desktop SAP does have a great opportunity to show their strength in the Analytics area and offer a great solution for on-premise and with Cloud for Analytics an alternative for cloud based scenarios.

just look on the positive side: Design Studio integrates with planning, integrates with BW, HANA, S4/HANA, integrates with functionality like Report Report Interface, Currency Translations, Fiori Launchpad, ........

another important proof to me is always how many customers are speaking about the product and their own projects at conferences and I see customers talking about their Design Studio projects at every conference - and its not a negative talk but instead a success story.

If I could have one small "wish" in regards to Design Studio .... that would be that SAP changes the communication on the Lumira 2.0 roadmap slightly and doesn't communicate it as a "merger" with "2 BI clients" - because customers are confused and the "Lumira" brand doesn't help either right now......

So in a nutshell - do I believe in Design Studio and would I recommend it to customers ? 7x24

.... and people that know me for a few years know that I would not say (and for sure not write) this when I would not be willing to stand behind this and not believe in it.

best regards

Ingo

[Former Member]

Hi Ingo.

Nice propaganda statement

Maybe my comment led into a wrong direction?!

But the main problem with DS is poor testing and especially poor regression tests!

If you take e.g. Currency Conversion which should have been available in May 2016!

Only with the latest Patch mid of August now, we are really able to use it in production - of course only after we will have completed the third internal test phase, for being sure all functionality which had been working before, is still working!

That is exactly the problem which Gabriel did emphasize: Development Speed or strategy is one thing you can argue about. But delivering a product which loses functionality from time to time and therefore is not reliable, this is just not acceptable!

BR, Martin

[former_member201696]

Hi Ingo,

Thanks a lot for this full statement.

Excellently what Martin wrote is the problem. We know in Design Studio we miss same functions, but the mean problem is that the existing function did not work 100%. Martins example with the Currency Conversion we get several time in the last 1 year.

I also scary about the plan to merge Lumira and Design Studio. I hope we will get not the same situation like in Design Studio 1 year before. I hope SAP, will do a INTENSIVE test for the Version 2.0.

BR

Gabriel

[IngoH]

Hello Martin,

I understand the concern and have their been perhaps  a little "much" of regressions lately - yes, but also lets be realistic - Design Studio is probably together with Analysis Office the best quality in the overall BI portfolio.

Compare it with the other products like Lumira Desktop, Web Intelligence, ....

I am not trying to give excuses here but its also interesting that lately everyone on SCN seems to just "complain" but no one is sharing their positive experience here.

Now - again not trying to excuse anything - but think about what everyone's impression will be - including the product team in Walldorf - if all that is being shared are complains ?

So ask yourself - is Design Studio perfect ? No its not.

Is Design Studio at a stage to fully replace WAD ? No its not yet.

Is Design Studio a product you can put into product ? yes it is.

Is Design Studio much better than Xcelsius ever was ? Yes it is.

just my 2 cents

regards

Ingo Hilgefort

[IngoH]

Hi Gabriel,

the larger problem I see here is that customer associate the "Lumira" brand with Design Studio now and that customers associate the Quality of "Lumira" with Design Studio now and basically stop projects.

regards

Ingo Hilgefort

[Former Member]

Ingo Hilgefort wrote:

I am not trying to give excuses here but its also interesting that lately everyone on SCN seems to just "complain" but no one is sharing their positive experience here.

Now - again not trying to excuse anything - but think about what everyone's impression will be - including the product team in Walldorf - if all that is being shared are complains ?

Maybe that's just what the product team needs: an eye opener that customers ARE getting more and more frustrated and that the complaints are starting to drown out the success stories?

Also, i don't see how we as a community should be held repsonisble for painting a better picture then the reality?

And don't get me wrong Ingo, but i often feel that product managment and extension developers have a 'pink colored' view of the reality because they only come into contact with the big, succesful customers with big pockets and big teams.

The struggle of the 'little' customer trying to get a good ROI on his SAP BI dollars gets overlooked all too often

[IngoH]

Hi Tom,

I am sure that the teams are hearing the message and I am not giving a "pink" view here. In case you don't know we well yet - I have always been very realistic and very honest about the product.

I am not saying that the role of the community is to "sing the praise" here - but in the same way it shouldn't be all about complaining either. It should be a open, honest, realistic conversation.

Look back at this conversation here - no one has mentioned what type of projects they have realized with Design Studio and I am sure people have rolled out projects - people only painted the negatives.

I am not expecting people to paint a "wrong" image - but at least lets paint a realistic picture.

and I am not just looking at large customers - we as a partner have large and small customers and believe me the teams are not big teams.

regards

Ingo

[Former Member]

Hi Ingo,

it seems we just have different expectations?

If new tools are promoted and they can be compared with earlier tools, then of course we do it!

Our expectation is that new tools are capable of what the previous were and being also better at the same time.

If they are not better, why would we use them? And if they are not capable we could not use them...

Exactly the same is true for other Topics, as well! See my first link, discussing with Brian Wood about BW on HANA 7.40.

I'm sorry that I don't post success stories here about DS ... but I doubt anyone did with WAD 7.0, either?!

I really hope the Product Team in Walldorf is reading this blog and will decreae the error rate in newer versions and patches. Exactly THIS was and is the main complaint in this topic!

Besides that, as Gabriel stated before... we don't have the impression that SAP is really aware of the pain of constantly installing and testing new versions & patches. Otherwise they would test more thorougly to improve versions only and not releasing patch after patch.

Unfortunately that is the hard way, SAP customers judge nowadays.

Good advice to SAP: If you cannot change the wind, then set your sails differently!

[Henry_Banks]

Hi Gabriel,

My name is Henry Banks - i work for SAP. I'm sorry it's taken so long for an employee to respond.

Your feedback is really important to us, and thank you for continuously logging defects to help improve product quality. I understand this is not your dedicated job.. so please accept my personal apologies for that.

You mention a very good point about TESTING the forthcoming 'converged' 2.0 release. (Although currently unannounced) Of course, I'm expecting SAP will shortly offer a Validation, then Ramp-Up program(s).

Although I cannot myself make guarantees of your inclusion, I personally would like to see your customer/account to be represented in that activity (if that is *when the time is right* an effort you might find useful).

Please could you next contact me via the SCN, using the 'direct message' functionality, so that I can try take this to the next level?

Kind regards,

Henry

[Former Member]

Hi Gabriel,

I fully understand your complaints and totally agree with your disappointment.

The same was true if you used Analysis for MS Office too early, as "the premium alternative" to BEX Analyzer. In newer version you frequently had issues which did not occur in previous versions and were corrected only in the next one.

The worst part here was that it is a locally installed add-in, which you have to roll-out to the local machines of EVERY user.

End of last year I already had a discussion about SAP's current "strategy", here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-68340

It's up to you, how you interpret this statement 😉

Generally, we do not force customers to adopt new or alternate features. There's a long maintenance window and customers can decide at their own pace if and when to upgrade or switch from "old to new". We have limited resources meaning not everything can be developed immediately. Therefore, items are prioritized based on feedback we collect from many channels. Idea place is just one of them.

Your blog post clearly points it out that many customers are not satisfied with how SAP sees this. So, we can only hope that SAP puts more efforts at least into regression tests 😞

Best regards, Martin

[former_member201696]

Hi Martin,

We start this year also with Analysis for Office and we have the same issues with local installation.

For the Design Studio Developer Tool, we have the same problem. After the upgrade we need always for all developer (40 Person) a roll-out for the installation, because nobody can install software be him self. Second problem is in our company, the creation of the roll-out installation package takes between 6-8 weeks.

I'm also disappointed that SAP means, we can upgrade Design Studio, very easy, maybe every 2 Month. But each upgrade costs a lot of coordination, because we have 4 system landscape. Every upgrade takes more then 4 weeks processing time and more then 20'000 CHF cost.

BR

Gabriel

[Former Member]

Hi Gabriel

I'm also very dissapointet although we pushed Design Studio with a lot of hope.

- Integration in the SAP Portal is making the Design Studio extremly slow (I always thought that SAP Applications provided by SAP really work good together )

- Design Studio it self is not a performant Tool

- The multilanguage is a really big issue. In our Country we have customer on 3 languages and it is (and was always) a requirement that we have our reports on the logon Languages. Altough SAP says it will work soon. We are still waiting and it is not

- Bookmark functionalities didn't work at the beginning, then with an upgrade it worked and now not anymore. This is really bad. Our users are working a lot with Bookmarks.

- The printing, is as it always was in SAP Front End (WAD) not usable why is this so complicated every other Front End Company is able to deploy a good printing functionallity ?

- Oh yes try once to make a graphic with showing the data in decimals or not, you will get crazy

- On the Graphics items you are not able to customize every Thing really properly it is always a try and error. And at the and you Need to use the script (for a simple graphic).

Yes I', also a very disapointed user and developper !

best regards Stefania

[IngoH]

Hello Stefania,

could you share more details on what the issue is with the multi-lingual dashboards ?

regards

Ingo Hilgefort, Visual BI

[gopinath_kolli]

Hi Gabriel,

I am a design studio developer.

please tell us what are the basic requirements which are unable to do with Design studio.

i would like to hear and discuss the same in this blog.

Thanks,

Gopinath.

[Former Member]

This message was moderated.

[Former Member]

HI Gopi,

I Have some Queries in design studio As SCN People Suggested Please follow me to share contact details between you and me. i already started following you .Please do it share contact details .

Thanks,

varun

[Former Member]

Hi Gopi, Varun, Gabriel

There are a lot of essential functionalites missing or the functionalites are absolutly not user friendly.

Small Little example which frustrates every User: On a Info Object you have attributes (this is Standard of BI and used 100 times). if the enduser wants to Show the attributes he Needs to do it 1 after the other. He is not able to say I would like to see 1-x Attributes on the Info Objects (is this user friendly ?)

Best Regards Stefania

PS. I will reply on Gabriel's Blog to share more examples

[former_member201696]

Hi Gopi,

General problem is, that I created 45 OSS Tickets with bugs, for a tool how are provide to customers. The most of this Tickets are basic. This is impertinence for me.

If you wand i can send you a Mail with the list of Tickets.

actual i have the problem that after the upgrade to 1.6 SP2 Patch1 the bookmark are not working. The problem is here described.

http://scn.sap.com/thread/3921696

The fix will available in 1.6 SP3. But i need now a solution for my 4500 User.

This scenario happens now the 3th time. I upgrade the Design Studio for fixing a problem, but after the upgrade i get a new big issues. What did you think how happy are the end user about this?

BR

Gabriel

[gopinath_kolli]

I can understand your situation.

I would like to study them, Please send me a mail with the list of Tickets.

Thanks in advance

[michael_simon4]

Hi Gopinath,

for a list of quite basic functionalities which are not (yet) possible just take a look at your own IdeaPlace.

For a tool which is described as a premium alternative for WAD and which has to compete against strong competitors in the market - it simply isn't enough.

We started to implement DS templates with version 1.2 and are still struggling hard to replace WAD 3.5(!) web templates. In general users love DS reports/dashboards at the first glance, but as soon as they are digging deeper, they are quite disappointed (bugs, missing features, performance).

Moreover, the time between the reporting of an error as SAP note until the solution is delivered to our customers is very long (bad response times on OSS, time to next SP, time to implement & test SP at our site, etc.). This is especially a problem, because we had a lot of issues in the past 3 years (I'd say we raised also around 50 OSS messages) and the SP deliveries in the past also brought in new errors.

As Gabriel also pointed out it is necessary to install every single SP (or even patches between Support Packages), because of critical errors fixed within the SP - this is a huge testing effort for the IT department.

So please, make SAP web reporting great again

Best regards,

Michael

[thomas_quaebicker]

Hello Gopinath,

we are running hundreds of WAD-7.0 reports that I would like to migrate to DS. But in most cases it is not possible, because the WAD functionality of saving variants in the variable-screen is not available. I could see on the roadmap since more than one year the announcement of this issue, but everytime a new version is published the functionality is still on the right side as a target for the future.

Kind regards,

Thomas

[Former Member]

It is so frustrating waiting for the key features that are still missing. Best example is the saving variant support.

We've migrated some old WADs to Design Studio, promising the business that saving variants will be implemented as soon as available (and NO, bookamarks are not a replacement for it).

But seeing that for Design Studio 2.0 variant support is STILL in the "future direction" just makes me sick (see www.sapevents.edgesuite.net/TechEd/TechEd_Vegas2016/pdfs/ANP100.pdf page 53), even this feature is requested in the Design Studio idea place for over 3 years (and it's even in the status "accepted" by SAP, see Variable selection variants : View Idea).

[MustafaBensan]

Hi Robert,

While I am familiar with WAD I can't claim to be an expert on it.  Therefore, I am keen to understand from your perspective which specific features of saving variants cannot be reproduced with bookmarks in Design Studio?

Thanks,

Mustafa.

[IngoH]

Hello Mustafa, Robert,

agree that the variant / personalization is an important topic that is still missing.

Mustafa:

the bookmarks wouldn't really "help" here because the Variants / Personalization is a concept that goes across the BI tools and the user wants to re-use / create / view those variants and creating a bookmark means you can only use it in Design Studio but then Design Studio would not be able to read a variant that was create in BEx or WAD or Analysis Office - and the way around wouldn't work either.

In addition a bookmark is more about the "state" of the application and it would store a lot more (possible unnecessary / disturbing) information whereas a Variable Variant is just doing that - storing the variable settings.

regards

Ingo Hilgefort, Visual BI

[Former Member]

Hi Gabriel,

May i know What is your  Data source?

what  are the difficulties you faced in design studio(1.6 version) as you said basic functionalities.if you can give glance of all things .that would help others to share more

Thanks,

varun

[former_member201696]

Hi varun,

Thanks for you answer.

I wouldn't discuss specific bug.

I would like to share my experience. Working two years with design studio, with 450 reports and 4500 end user from different departments with different needs to Reporting.

BR

Gabriel

[Former Member]

HI Gabriel,

Yeah i can understand .So we are happy to hear your experience which  makes you frustrated .so by that Experts who are in the group can drive you in right path .we can close the gaps as well. it would be great if you could share your pain points that would help most of design studio users.

Thanks,

varun