Overview
Apricot Results Reporting is getting a brand-new look and feel! As part of our push towards continued excellence, we are upgrading Apricot Results Reporting to the latest version of Business Objects (4.3 SP01).
From this upgrade, Apricot 360 customers can expect a more intuitive user interface, as well as new features to make reporting workflow even easier.
Functionality & Features
For an in-depth look at what to expect from SAP for this Service Pack Upgrade, please check out their release notes for 4.3 SP01. Below is a breakdown of some of the key changes.
BI Launch Pad
When you first login in to the newly upgraded Apricot Results Reporting, you’ll first notice a completely new home page.
This new Home page presents some tiles that will give you access to your repository’s resources:
Folders: to navigate in the BI Platform repository folders.
Categories: to navigate in the BI Platform repository categories.
Documents: to display your documents as a flat list.
BI Inbox: to access the documents and alerts you have received.
Instances: to give you an overview of all your schedules and publications.
Recycle Bin: to display and restore documents you have deleted.
Under these tiles, three sections with document tiles are displayed:
Favorites – Documents you have set as favorites
Recent Documents – Documents you have previously opened
Recently Run – Documents that have been recently processed through schedules
Finally, under the Applications section, you will see Web Intelligence.
You will also have a new User Menu with new Settings. Please see SAP’s release notes (linked above) for more information.
Publishing and Scheduling
Publishing
When the new BI Launch Pad has been released in SAP BI 4.2 SP4, it was possible to schedule documents but not to distribute them through publications. In SAP BI 4.3, this missing capability has been implemented in BI Launch Pad and offers the same options as in SAP BI 4.2.
To create a publication, go to a folder, click the Create/upload objects button at the top of the folder’s page and select Publication in the menu.
In the New Publication page, enter the publication parameters. These parameters are organized by sections, displayed in two tabs. Depending on the document type, some parameters appear only after the source documents have been added to the publication.
To navigate into the possible parameters more easily, you may click the following tabs, and select the section in the corresponding menus:
General. This tab contains the generic publication parameters: publication details, source documents, destination, recurrence, enterprise and dynamics recipients, events, …
Report Features. This tab and its sections appear if your publication contains a Web Intelligence or Crystal Reports document. It contains publication properties that are specific to this document type. For Web Intelligence, this covers the publication formats, personalization, prompts and delivery rules.
Summary: This tab displays the publication’s most common parameters.
When the publication is defined, click Save or Save and Close.
Scheduling
In SAP BI 4.3, you can still schedule a document. To provide the same look & feel as in New Publication page, the Schedule page has been modified.
When defining a schedule, you can move to specific sections through two tabs and the corresponding menus.
The General tab contains the generic sections that define a schedule, like the schedule’s destinations and recurrence, its attached events, …
The Report Features tab contains the sections specific to a Web Intelligence document. Formats, Prompts and Delivery Rules are available, but Caching properties are not yet implemented.
Both schedule and publication take advantage of the new options introduced in SAP BI 4.3:
When you define the publication or schedule frequency in the Recurrence section, you can select business days and hours for the schedule to run.
Another new option, Allow Retries, can be used to define if a failed schedule must be re-run and if so, how many times and when.
When adding an Email destination to a schedule or a publication, in the email properties, you can fill the Reply-To text field to define an email address if the schedule recipient answers to the received email.
You can also format the message to be sent by using the options available in the toolbar of the text field: bold, italic, font, color…
In the History page of a scheduled document, the list of instances is automatically refreshed every 3 seconds, as in SAP BI 4.2.
There are additional changes to the Schedule Instances page that can be found at this link.
Web Intelligence
There are several visual and functionality changes to web intelligence that can be found at the links listed below:
Other Enhancements
Some enhancements have been done to simplify the use of Information Design Tool:
In the data foundation, when adding a table to a view, the list of views is alphabetically sorted.
In the data foundation and business layer editors, the search in the filter pop-up is case-insensitive.
In the Edit Business Layer View dialog box, you can order views by selecting them and clicking one of the two arrow buttons. This was already possible by dragging and dropping these views in the list. Views are displayed in Query Panel in the order you have defined.
When exporting a business layer as a Text, HTML or PDF file, the objects’ CUID are also saved if you select the Object CUID checkbox in the Save As dialog box.